C/N:8 Tail Number: N9645 (5-AT-B, 1928).

The Ford Tri-motor designed by William Bushnell Stout, an aeronautical engineer who had previously designed several aircraft using principles similar to those of Professor Hugo Junkers, There is an image of the Junkers JU-54 in my Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Museum Gallery.

In 1925, Ford bought Stout and its aircraft designs. A total of 199 Ford Tri-motors were built between 1926 and 1933. The aircraft resembled the Fokker F.VII Tri-motor, but unlike the Fokker, the Ford was all-metal, which was claimed to improve the safety of the aircraft.
The aircraft had a cruise speed of 90 mph with a top speed of 150 mph, the range was 550 miles with a service ceiling of 18,500 ft. As was common for the time, its rudder and elevators were controlled by wires that were strung along the external surface of the aircraft. The aircrew consisted of 3 personnel a pilot, copilot and a flight attendant. The 5-AT generally carried 10 passangers. The aircraft cost $42,000 in 1933.
Built primarily for passenger service the aircraft was generally replaced by the better designed DC-2 first conceived in 1932 and predecessor to the DC-3 and C-47. The impact of the Ford Tri-motor on commercial aviation was immediate, because the design represented a "quantum leap over the other airliners of the time. Within a few months of its introduction, Transcontinental Air Transportation was introduced to provide a coast-to-coast operation, capitalizing on the Tri-motor's ability to provide reliable and for the time, comfortable passenger service. (O'Leary, Michael. "When Fords Ruled the Sky (Part Two)." Air Classics, Volume 42, No. 5, May 2006.) One look at the cabin of the aircraft clearly shows that any flight on this aircraft would be nothing like a flight on a modern commercial airliner.
While advertised as a transcontinental service, the airline had to rely on buses and rail connections with a deluxe Pullman train that would be based in New York being the first part of the journey. Passengers then rendezvoused with a Tri-motor in Port Columbus, Ohio, that would begin a hop across the continent ending at Waynoka, Oklahoma where another train would take the passengers to Clovis, New Mexico where the final journey would begin, again on a Tri-motor, to end up at the Grand Central Air Terminal in Glendale, a few miles north-east of Los Angeles. (O’Leary)
The Stoughton bus featured in this gallery was representative of the type of transportation used to move passengers between the air and rail links.