YERINGTON, Nev. For Robert Burrowes, the bus business was more than an industry or career choice, much more. It was a lifetime passion.

Beginning in his teens and later, after a career of operating small private bus companies and managing public transit agencies, Mr. Burrowes became one of the western bus industrys best known advocates, photographers and historians. His photo collection, with images dating back to the 1920s, was legendary.

His dedication to the industry was such that for the past 20-plus years he adopted the sobriquet of "Nevada Bus Man," running a one-man industry advocacy organization, the Nevada Bus Association, and producing a periodic newsletter.

It may be hard for some to imagine, but he made the regional bus industry seem dynamic and engaging.

Mr. Burrowes died at the Renown Medical Center in Reno late last month. He was 89.

During the mid-20th century, Mr. Burrowes operated two bus companies in Northern California, one called Lincoln Transit Lines that operated in Stockton and ran to Sacramento, and another, Moraga Valley Stages, that ran from St. Marys College of California in Moraga to Alameda.

He helped found other bus companies and worked at one time for Gray Line, Greyhound and Key System in the San Francisco Bay area. He also was employed by public transit agencies in Southern California.

He retired in 1985 as executive director of Humbolt Transit Authority in Eureka, Calif.

Mr. Burrowes was born in Bozeman, Mont., the day after Christmas 1919. He liked to say his interest in buses and street cars began from birth because a trolley had passed by the moment he was born.

He had lived in Yerington for more than 20 years where he was involved in civic and social organizations, including the Senior Center and on the board of the local cemetery.

But it was the bus industry that inspired and imprisoned him, in the words of one of his sons.

He advocated for the industry before the state legislature as a lobbyist, he wrote about the business, he collected artifacts and took more than 20,000 bus photos, and he helped record the industrys history.

He was particularly interested in a company well known to the California bus industry, the Key System and its predecessors, that beginning in the 1860s operated horse-drawn rail cars, then electric streetcars, buses and ferries. Key eventually devolved into AC Transit, Californias third-largest public bus system.

Mr. Burrowes recently donated many of his archives to the Pacific Bus Museum, with more materials slated to go to other institutions or organizations.

He is survived by his sons, Harold of Fremont, Calif., and James of Bristol, Va., and his sister, Elizabeth Vierra of Salt Lake City, Utah.