Seddon: Buses

Note: This is a sub-section of Seddon Diesel Vehicles

General

1946 Seddon Motors Ltd moved to a former shadow factory in Oldham and were able to expand production from one or two a week to more than ten and here they introduced their first passenger chassis the Mark IV.

1951 The parent company went public as Seddon Diesel Vehicles

At the 1952 Earls Court Commercial Motor show marks 10 and 11 featured vertical Perkins (P6 80 bhp or R6 107 bhp) engines mounted underfloor (when competing underfloor engined buses used horizontally-oriented engines).

The mid 1950s mark 16 was a 21 ft long bus with a Perkins P4 on the front overhang and the mark 17 was a six-cylinder-engined chassis to similar layout.

The mark 18 of the late 1950s, mainly sold to Australia and New Zealand, with local coachwork. It had a vertically mounted Perkins P6 80 bhp engine on the rear overhang.

There was also one mark 20 with a Henry Meadows 550 cubic inch horizontal rear-engine exported to Greece.

The mark 23 was a front entrance front engined bus for Kowloon Motor Bus and the mark 25P a normal control 18-seat personnel-carrier based on the mark 25 integral parcel van.

The bodybuilding business, not only on Seddon and other manufacturer's buses but building lorry cabs and parcel vans for customers such as Manchester Corporation (who ran a parcel delivery service) was registered in its own right as Pennine Coachcraft (wholly owned by Seddon) in 1960.

From 1966 (with mark numbers climbing into the high twenties), Seddon decided to simplify its nomenclature, wagons were henceforth to be identified as (for example) 16-4 with the first number being the gross vehicle weight and the second the number of wheels. Bus chassis were to be known as Seddon Pennine Mark (x). The first buses using this system produced were for Bermuda and were Seddon Pennine Mark 3, they are believed to be similar to a short wheelbase Pennine Mark 4 but with Perkins P6 or 6-304 engines or an integral development of the Mark 17 model of similar layout.

1967 Launched the Pennine 4, which became a strong seller worldwide, the largest order being from Kowloon Motor Bus of Hong Kong, who took 100 11-metre versions with Perkins 170 bhp V8 engines and Pennine Coachcraft 47 seat + 42 standing dual-door bodies.

A rear-engined derivative was the Mark 5 (only one sold in the UK, a 45 seat Van Hool coach) and a version with a turbocharged Perkins 6-cylinder engine mounted at the front but under the passenger floor was the Pennine 6.

In 1969 a more concerted effort at the UK bus market resulted in the launch of the Pennine RU.

In 1970, Seddon took over Atkinson Lorries to form Seddon Atkinson, in 1974 International Harvester bought Seddon Atkinson, later Pegaso took over the business until it in turn became part of Iveco, the last lorries under the Seddon Atkinson name were built in Oldham in 2004.

1974 A battery-electric midibus was developed.

1983 Bus and coach production ceased when the last Pennine 7 models were delivered.

List of Models

• Mark IV (1948- )
• Mark VI (1950- )
• Mark 7P

• Pennine 7 (1974-82)

See Also

Loading...

Sources of Information

• [1] Wikipedia