THE annual vintage bus running day in Winchester on New Year’s Day will be the last.

Friends of King Alfred Buses (FoKAB) has announced that the 2014 Running Day in and around Winchester will be the last to be held on that day.

The charity says the looming Silver Hill scheme will see the bus station redeveloped.

So FoKAB says it will be rethinking the formula for 2015 but will still stage something similar.

On January 1 some 40 elderly buses, many from the defunct King Alfred Bus Company, will recreate journeys from a bygone era.

The last one saw 21,000 passenger journeys made on the day.

FoKAB founder and chairman James Freeman said: “We have had enormous fun staging this very popular event every year – taking advantage of what was often a blank space in people’s calendar to get people out after the Christmas holiday.

“But the world is changing and it’s time to do something different. For many years now we have relied on the generous help of our friends at Stagecoach in making the bus station available to accommodate the many visiting buses needed to carry the huge numbers of people wanting to ride on the buses.

“However, now that the days of the bus station are clearly numbered as the Silver Hill redevelopment starts to look as though it will really happen, we feel it’s time to stop and re-focus our efforts for future years.”