This thread has been started to continue discussion of the Leyland Olympian, and follows on from the earlier posts in this thread (posts #1-5 have been copied over):
Merseyside PTE had it's heart set on Atlanteans [seeing as it's predecessor had the first one] so never brought many Olympians, apart from the evaluation fleet, Merseybus bought a batch of 70 Olympians in 88/89 first 15 & last few of the batch went to Laird Street. GMPTE though, went with...
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I have a particular interest in the Olympian for a few reasons. First of all, double-deckers were rare in my rural neck of the woods; we had a handful of ageing Fleetlines and another handful of even older Bristol FLFs which were primarily used for school contract work and I might occasionally get to travel on a Fleetline which was allocated to the free Fine Fare (later ASDA) bus during school holidays.
Secondly, it was a model that was present throughout much of my life and essentially was the double-decker of my generation. Up here we had a handful of the Northern Scottish's ECW-bodied TSO-X batch, soon to be followed by a few of the B-LSO intake. The former had semi-automatic transmission while the latter had 3-speed Voith gearboxes and I was struck by how different they sounded. There was a brief period of time when the Grampian Scottish project was coming to an end (pending de-regulation) and we had a load transferred from Aberdeen to assist with repainting from the green/cream livery that they carried into the then-new Aberdeen Citybus colours.
Finally, the Olympian had a fairly nomadic existence in terms of production. It started off being built in Bristol, moved to Workington, moved to Farington briefly and then back to Workington before ultimately ending up as a Volvo product and being built at Irvine.