First AberdeenCompanies House extract company no SC097420
First Aberdeen Limited formerly Grampian Regional Transport Limited is the main bus company operator in

Aberdeen Aberdeen (; sco, Aiberdeen ; gd, Obar Dheathain ; la, Aberdonia) is a city in North East Scotland, and is the third most populous city in the country. Aberdeen is one of Scotland's 32 local government council areas (as Aberdeen City), a ...

, Scotland. It is a subsidiary of

FirstGroup FirstGroup plc is a British multi-national transport group, based in Aberdeen, Scotland.

Aberdeen Corporation

Aberdeen Corporation Tramways Aberdeen Corporation Tramways formerly served the City of Aberdeen, Scotland. The system The city's tram system was the most northerly municipal tramway in the United Kingdom. It started on 26 August 1898 when the Aberdeen Corporation purchased ...

was formed on 26 August 1898. The company was renamed Aberdeen Corporation Transport Department when it became solely a bus operator with trams ceasing on 3 May 1958.

Grampian Regional Transport

Under local government reorganisation in 1975, the Aberdeen Corporation bus operations transferred to Grampian Regional Transport, a department of the Grampian Regional Authority. To comply with the

Transport Act 1985 The Transport Act 1985 was an Act of Parliament in the United Kingdom. It introduced privatised and deregulated bus services throughout Great Britain and came into effect in October of 1986. The Act was created as a response to growing concern ...

, Grampian Regional Transport was incorporated in 1986, with the Grampian Regional Authority retaining ownership. In January 1989 the company was privatised under an

employee stock ownership plan Employee stock ownership, or employee share ownership, is where a company's employees own shares in that company (or in the parent company of a group of companies). US employees typically acquire shares through a share option plan. In the UK, Emp ...

led by its general manager

Moir Lockhead Sir Moir Lockhead OBE DHC (born 25 April 1945 in County Durham, England) is an English businessman. He was Chief Executive and Deputy Chairman of UK transport group FirstGroup. Originally a mechanical engineer, he left school (West Cornforth Sec ...

.The History of 395 King Street
FirstGroup At the time GRT operated a fleet of 200 buses and 500 employees. Unlike future similar sales in the UK, the sale of Grampian Regional Transport was done voluntarily by the council which had no overall majority party and had no deep rooted objection to the sale. At the time, councils could negotiate privately with single buyers, rather than the later practice of competitive bidding. It was a sale of a going concern, rather than as seen in other areas in later years, a

distress sale A fire sale is the sale of goods at extremely discounted prices. The term originated in reference to the sale of goods at a heavy discount due to fire damage. It may or may not be defined as a closeout, the final sale of goods to zero inventor ...

, or a forced sale for political reasons.

First Grampian

While the company continued to operate as GRT in Aberdeen, its holding company GRT Bus Group expanded through acquisition purchasing six former nationalised bus companies in England and Scotland. In April 1994 GRT Bus Group became a public limited company. In April 1995

FirstBus FirstGroup plc is a British multi-national transport group, based in Aberdeen, Scotland.Badgerline Badgerline was a bus operator in and around Bristol from 1985 until 2003. Its headquarters were in Weston-super-Mare. Initially a part of the Bristol Omnibus Company, it was privatised in September 1986 and sold to Badgerline Holdings in a manag ...

and GRT Bus Groups, with fleets in England, Wales and Scotland. Aberdeen was selected as the headquarters. In February 1998 Grampian Regional Transport was rebranded as First Aberdeen.

Liveries

Aberdeen Corporation had a dark green and white livery, later becoming pea-green and cream. Council owned Grampian Regional Transport changed this livery, by removing the upper green band, replacing it with a thinner orange band, with Grampian fleetnames and a council crest. When privatised, a scheme with a larger area of cream base colour, supplemented by a two-tone green stripe pattern was adopted. The cream base and stripe layout would become the corporate livery for the

GRT Group :''This article describes the bus group, for the Grampian Regional Transport bus company and successors/predecessors, see First Aberdeen'' GRT Group was a bus operating company in the United Kingdom from 1989 until 1995. It was formed when Gr ...

, albeit with different colours for the stripes. The First Grampian livery consisted of the existing livery, with the fleetname changed to the FirstBus corporate style with the stylised ''f'' symbol. FirstGroup corporate livery was adopted in 1998 upon being rebranded as First Aberdeen.

Fleet

A mainstay of the fleet in the 1970s up to 1983 was the

Alexander Alexander is a male given name. The most prominent bearer of the name is Alexander the Great, the king of the Ancient Greek kingdom of Macedonia who created one of the largest empires in ancient history. Variants listed here are Aleksandar, Al ...

AL Type bodied

Leyland Atlantean The Leyland Atlantean is a predominantly double-decker bus chassis manufactured by Leyland Motors between 1958 and 1986. Only 17 Atlantean chassis were bodied as single deck from new. It pioneered the design of rear-engined, front entranc ...

, supplemented by the

Leyland National The Leyland National is an integrally-constructed United Kingdom, British high-floor, step-floor single-decker bus manufactured in large quantities between 1972 and 1985. It was developed as a joint project between two UK nationalised industri ...

single-decker bus. In 1985 it moved to Alexander RH bodied

Leyland Olympian The Leyland Olympian was a 2-axle and 3-axle double-decker bus chassis manufactured by Leyland between 1980 and 1993. It was the last Leyland bus model in production. Construction The Olympian had the same chassis and running gear as ...

double-deckers until 1988. From 1991 to 1997 the company steadily bought the

Mercedes-Benz O405 The Mercedes-Benz O405 was a single-decker bus manufactured by Mercedes-Benz from the mid-1980s to the early 2000s as either an integral bus or a bus chassis and was the last VöV SL-II standard bus in production. It was the replacement for th ...

single-decker. Grampian Regional Transport was one of the first UK users of

articulated bus An articulated bus, also referred to as a banana bus, bendy bus, tandem bus, vestibule bus, wiggle wagon, stretch bus, or an accordion bus, (either a motor bus or trolleybus) is an articulated vehicle used in public transportation. It is u ...

es. Aberdeen is one of the major locations for articulated buses in the United Kingdom with around 35 in the fleet in December 2013.FirstGroup Fleetlist
Steve White As of March 2013 the fleet consisted of 173 buses and coaches. In 2014, the firm purchased 26

Wright StreetLite The Wright StreetLite is a low-floor midibus introduced by Wrightbus in 2010. It was originally available in only one body style (wheel forward) before the door forward and StreetLite Max variants were introduced in 2011 and 2012 respectively. ...

micro-hybrid buses. First Aberdeen were the world's first operator of double-decker

hydrogen fuel cell bus A fuel cell bus is a bus that uses a hydrogen fuel cell as its power source for electrically driven wheels, sometimes augmented in a hybrid fashion with batteries or a supercapacitor. The only emission from the bus is water. Several cities aroun ...

es, taking delivery of 15 Wright StreetDeck Hydroliners in January 2021. These were initially taken off the road in January 2022 due to technical faults and were temporarily replaced with Euro VI diesel buses loaned from First Glasgow. The first of these returned to service in April 2022. 10 more joined the fleet in April 2022, bringing the total fleet of Hydroliners to 25.

Daytime Services

A Metro network was introduced on 13 May 2001 as a series of colour-coded high-frequency routes with the promise of no reduction in services in the following three years. In September 2004, a small number of services were withdrawn and minor revisions were made to some existing services. Metro was later renamed the Overground network in line with other FirstGroup companies. This was a group wide initiative to rationalise route networks into high frequency colour-coded networks running on main routes, to reduce the amount of confusing overlaps and divergences of routes on minor roads. In 2008, First Aberdeen revamped their entire network axing little used services and focusing on the Overground routes. The required 90% of Aberdeen's timetable to be changed. On 16 September 2012 First has been introducing a network review of services which is the biggest service change since 2008. The review reduces frequency on most routes. It also removes evening and Sunday services to parts of the city..

Revenue

Most First Aberdeen services are operated commercially, an exception to this is the council subsidised Service 40 which operates from Guild Street to Dubford on Sundays. The company operates an exact fare policy, whereby no change is given by the driver, though they also allow

contactless payment Contactless payment systems are credit cards and debit cards, key fobs, smart cards, or other devices, including smartphones and other mobile devices, that use radio-frequency identification (RFID) or near-field communication (NFC, e.g. Samsung ...

along with payment through the First Bus app on the Android and iOS mobile operating systems. The fleet was one of two divisions in FirstBus picked to trial the new "ticketer" ticket machines at the start of 2017.

King Street Headquarters

The company has occupied a historic depot site at 395 King Street at the heart of the city since 1914. It was built in 1862 and bought by Aberdeen Corporation Tramways The site has also served as global headquarters of FirstGroup since its formation in 1995. On 21 June 2007 First gained permission to redevelop the site into a new Aberdeen bus depot and global FirstGroup headquarters building. It was officially opened by

Anne, Princess Royal Anne, Princess Royal (Anne Elizabeth Alice Louise; born 15 August 1950), is a member of the British royal family. She is the second child and only daughter of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, and the only sister of ...

on 15 July 2010.The Princess Royal opens FirstGroup's new Aberdeen base
''BBC News'' 15 July 2010

References

External links

Company website
{{FirstGroup Bus operators in Scotland FirstGroup companies