The Denver Regional Transportation District (RTD) awarded New Flyer Industries Inc. a five-year contract to build up to 192 diesel 60-foot Xcelsior heavy-duty transit buses (or 384 equivalent units or EUs). This is the first time the company will build buses for RTD.

The contract, which contains a firm order for 52 buses using New Flyer's Xcelsior platform, includes 12 to be built using New Flyer's Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) styling. The contract also contains up to 140 options that may be awarded at a later date, with the option to build buses of diesel-hybrid, CNG or clean diesel propulsion.

RTD has an active transit bus fleet of 572 buses with an average bus fleet age of more than 10 years. The addition of these 52 Xcelsior buses will help RTD serve their 2.8 million service area population encompassed in the 40 municipalities, six counties, and two city/county jurisdictions.

The BRT style buses will be used to implement the new metroRide service, RTD's new free downtown circulator being implemented to correspond to the opening of Denver Union Station as the new multimodal transportation hub in downtown Denver.

Production of the 12 60-foot BRT-styled buses is scheduled to begin in the first quarter of 2014 with all buses being delivered by the second quarter 2014. The 52 60-foot Xcelsior buses will be manufactured beginning in the first quarter of 2014 and will all be completely manufactured and assembled at New Flyer of America's St. Cloud, Minn. manufacturing facility.