A north-east transport firm is rolling back the years after giving one of its buses a retro paint job.
Stagecoach has unveiled a special heritage vehicle that will serve communities across both Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire.
It looks exactly the same as the Leopard and Tiger buses used in the region in the mid-1980s.
At that time the company was operated by Northern Scottish Omibuses trading as Bluebird Northern. Stagecoach then bought the company in March 1991.
It took the team at Stagecoach’s Tullos depot three weeks to complete the transformation of the bus.
A team of engineers got to work on the bus at the beginning of April 2021 drawing up the design before carrying out the priming, painting and final signwriting on the bus.
The bus was painstakingly painted carefully by hand and the finishing signwriting touches also completed by hand.
The heritage livery features the original ‘Bluebird’ logo which many bus drivers of the 80s and 90s had proudly tattooed on their arms.
Peter Knight, managing director for Stagecoach Bluebird said: “I’m really proud of how our Engineers have worked together to restore this bus to how it would have looked in the 1980s.
“I know many of our customers will remember travelling on the original Bluebird Northern buses and hope when they see the bus on the road it brings back fond memories of keeping connected by bus.”
The heritage bus operated the first service trips today on services 4, 5 and 6 connecting Aberdeen city centre to Countesswells and Westhill.
