was produced in 1991). 2000s In the school bus manufacturing segment, the beginning of the 2000s marked a period of uncertainty. In 2001, following the closure of Carpenter, the number of body manufacturers had declined from seven to three in ten years; AmTran would rebrand itself (twice, in less than two years). The acquisition of Thomas by Freightliner brought financial stability to the company (something not initially afforded to the Blue Bird Corporation). In the early 2000s, Thomas restructured its manufacturing footprint, centering it around its High Point headquarters. Following the closure of the Monterrey facility in the late 1990s, the company opened a separate facility in High Point for Minotour assembly in 1999; in 2000, a facility was opened to produce Thomas Dennis low-floor buses in Jamestown, North Carolina. Thomas Built Buses of Canada in Woodstock, Ontario, was closed in 2001 (as part of a Freightliner restructuring), with Thomas opening a third school bus assembly facility High Point in 2004. In 2002, John W. Thomas III retired, becoming the final family member to manage the firm; serving as president since 1992, Thomas remained with the company as a consultant. He was succeeded by John O'Leary, a financially educated manager in charge of the turnaround of parent company Freightliner. During the 2000s, Thomas began to wind down its presence in the transit bus segment. While the Thomas Dennis SLF200 found buyers, the product line struggled to gain a foothold against established transit buses; after 2002, the Thomas Dennis joint venture was reorganized by Daimler (effectively replacing Thomas with distributor Orion) and the SLF200 was discontinued when Dennis' successor Transbus International withdrew from the venture. The Thomas-designed TL960 (which replaced the aging Chartour/CL960) was discontinued in 2002, replacing dedicated transit buses with school bus derivatives as Thomas consolidated commercial production to the Transit Liner EF/ER. In 2005, company founder Perley Thomas became one of the first inductees (posthumously) of the North Carolina Transportation Hall of Fame in Raleigh, North Carolina. In 2007, the North Carolina Transportation Museum received the donation of a 1940 Thomas Car Works school bus from Thomas Built Buses. Following the 2004 introduction of the Saf-T-Liner C2, Thomas produced the model line along its Saf-T-Liner Conventional predecessor. After nearly 35 years of production of the Saf-T-Liner Conventional body; the 62,764th and final example on the FS-65 chassis was produced on December 13, 2006. New-generation buses At the beginning