Carlisle Bus Group
Carlisle Bus Group or Carlisle Bus for short was set up in September 2012 by 7 individuals (Andrew Bray, Lee Wardle, Gordon Ogden, Steve Newton, David Blair, Dale Howcroft & Colin Read) to secure the preservation of Leyland Olympian/Alexander 14245 (F805FAO). This bus was new in May 1988 and was the 3rd bus that Stagecoach bought for Carlisle and one of the first in the country. Back then it was known as 1005 and was new in Stagecoach Stripes.
Since then it has only ever operated out of 3 Cumbrian depots, these being Barrow, Carlisle & Kendal. Whilst in use at Carlisle it was used on mainly Town services before moving to Barrow where it worked mainly school services and main Barrow service 6 and then onto Kendal where yet again its main use was a school bus due its high capacity (87) seats and runs on service 555 between Lancaster and Keswick when the route was Volvo Olympian operated.
10th May 2010 it was painted into cms Cumberland livery in time for the annual Stagecoach North West open day at Carlisle. Not a great deal of time passed before it’s engine which it had from new failed and it spent the Summer of 2011 VOR while the new engine was fitted. A replacement engine was sourced from Barrow based Leyland Olympian 14266 which had been wrote off earlier in the year.
The engine was replaced and it was back out on its usual mix of Dallam School runs and various 530/567 runs. Its last major work came in the summer of 2012 where it performed 555 Summer only extras between Kendal & Keswick. It was withdrawn on Thursday 20/09/2012 after a minor prang and was collected and taken to Carlisle depot on 23/09/2012 for further storage.
December 2012 and the paperwork finally arrived and F805FAO passed into the ownership of Carlisle Bus Group.
Since then we have attended the Kirkby Stephen Running Day and the north East Bus & Coach show.
