Trailways

The Trailways pinball machine was produced by Bally Manufacturing Corporation in 1941, with the earliest known reference to it appearing in The Billboard on May 10, 1941. It is a single-player, flipperless electro-mechanical machine built around a bus and transportation theme, fitting for its name.

As a flipperless game from the pre-flipper era of pinball (flippers would not be introduced industry-wide until 1947), Trailways relied on skillful plunging and the natural layout of pins, holes, and lanes rather than player-controlled flippers to route the ball and score points, in keeping with the design conventions of early-1940s EM machines.

Little detailed documentation survives about Trailways' specific rules or artwork, but its transportation theme and busses-and-travel motif tie directly to its name, and it stands as an example of Bally's early-1940s output before flippers reshaped the industry.