DALLAS - Greyhound Lines has awarded Motor Coach Industries a huge contract to refurbish 400 MCI D3 and DL3 coaches.

The project, which includes installing new passenger seats and other interior upgrades, body work, complete repainting, and new graphics, is expected to take upwards of a year to complete.

Greyhound's fleet includes 85 D3 coaches and 660 DL3s, meaning more than half of the company D-models will be refurbished. Greyhound has been operating D3s since 1996, and began adding DL3s two years later. All of the buses are smooth sided; they do not have stainless-steel fluting along the exterior like the older-model MC-12s.

Although a dollar amount for the contract was not available, it easily could top $7 million, with the final figure hinging on the extent of the body and interior work needed to restore the buses to Greyhound standards.

The MCI Fleet Support Service Center in Loudonville, Ohio, will handle the project.

"MCI is very pleased to have won the contract," said Jerry Cignarella, vice president of service center operations at MCI. "It's a testament to the confidence Greyhound has in our capabilities."

Cignarella said his goal is to quickly gear up the project so 40 buses are completed each month. All buses will be inspected inside and out against Greyhound standards and the results reported to Greyhound, which will decide the extent of repairs, fixes or upgrades. Although all buses will receive new passenger seats, driver seat cushioning and upholstery, and entry flooring, some also may require interior sidewall, window or ceiling refurbishing, as well as passenger-compartment flooring.

Similarly, some coaches will need more body work than others.

Under the deal, Greyhound is contracting separately for the 21,000-plus seats that will be supplied to MCI for installation in the coaches.

A key element of the project is new graphics for the coaches. Turbo Images of Saint-George, Quebec, will supply a contemporary Greyhound graphics treatment after the coaches have been repainted white.

For some time, the industry has been expecting Greyhound to launch a big-league rehab project because of cutbacks in its new-coach buying. For a period of years in the 1990s and early in this decade, Greyhound purchased as many as 200 new coaches annually. That stopped after 9/11. Its last new-coach buy of any significance was 20 MCI G4500s more than a year ago -- after buying none in 2003.