The Seddon Pennine RU was a rear-engined single-decker bus built by Seddon Diesel Vehicles/Seddon Atkinson between 1969 and 1974.
RU description The Seddon Pennine RU (for rear-underfloor, the location of the engine) was launched in 1969 as a competitor in the market for rear-engine single deckers. Although a very different product to the Pennine 4 it followed the same market-driven philosophy. Viz: offer the same major features as the most in-demand model but cut out most of the complexity, some of the purchase price and offer it for sale quickly and cheaply with the choice of in-house Pennine Coachcraft bodywork. The market leader was in the rear-engine single-deck segment was the Bristol RE and Seddon decided to use similar mechanical units, notably Gardner engines and Self-Changing Gears semi-automatic transmission.
Whereas the RE used a gently ramped frame on bus variants. Seddon decided to use a straight frame using 8in channel longitudinals and mainly tubular cross-members which was oriented to rise from front to rear at about 5 degrees from the horizontal. Wheelbases offered were either 16 ft 6in for 33 ft coachwork or 18 ft 6in for 36 ft bodies. Instead of the complex drive-line arrangement of the RE a straightforward T-drive layout was employed. The rear end of the 10.45-litre Gardner 6HLX (the 8.6 litre 6HLW was optional) was mounted below and hard against the rear cross member on the short version, driving directly via a fluid flywheel into a Self-Changing Gears 4 or 5-speed direct-operating epicyclic gearbox, air-operated with electrical control. The Eaton spiral-bevel rear axle, to a variety of different final drive ratios, was just ahead of the power pack and a very short drive shaft was fitted with resilient rubber-based joints. Originally on the long-wheelbase version a similar arrangement was employed but with the engine further from the rear of the frame. Conventional leaf springs were used, but the spring shackle-pins were fitted with polyurethane bushes, which would not require greasing and so reduce maintenance costs. The braking was full air-operated using Girling wedge-type drum brakes. A spring operated air parking-brake was employed, power steering for the Seddon-designed front-axle was optionally available. Unlike the RE and the Leyland Panther the radiator was not carried at the front but hung from the offside of the chassis in mid-wheelbase, ahead of the rear axle. A combined saloon heating and ventilation system with a thermostatically-controlled heat-exchanger and reversible fan drive was announced but this was never made available to customers.
The Pennine Coachcraft body was a jig-built aluminium-framed structure similar to that of the standard body fitted to the Pennine 4. It was directly attached to the Pennine RU chassis frame, saving further cost and weight. Although this body was intended as the standard offering, other coachbuilders' products could be fitted. In the event three other makes of bodies were fitted to the RU, Plaxton used a steel-reinforced hardwood structure whilst East Lancashire Coachbuilders and Charles H Roe both used steel-tube framing.
The initial prototype TBU598G, registered in March 1969, carried a Pennine Coachcraft 41 seat dual-door body on the short-wheelbase version of the chassis and Seddon demonstrated it to a number of municipal and company fleets mainly in the Pennines, commencing its career in Halifax.Hillditch (1981), p. 109 The second prototype was to the 36 ft length with 45 seats and dual doors. It was exhibited at the 1970 Commercial Motor show at Earls Court in the livery of Crosville where it was overshadowed by the debuts of the Leyland National and the Metro-Scania;Booth and Parke in Parke (November 1970), pp. 436-40 it was then registered ABU451J and served as a demonstrator across Great Britain.GR Mills, "Fleet News" in Parke (May 1971), p. 198, Buses Fleet news for May 1971 reports a demonstration to Portsmouth Corporation and pictures the bus demonstrating to Colchester Corporation both during February 1971 Initial list prices complete with body started at £6,200 which was substantially cheaper than an equivalent ECW-bodied RE,Hillditch (1981), p. 110 lead times were very good because Seddon had expanded into adjacent premises in order to set up a dedicated bus-production facility. Furthermore, the RU was the first bus chassis designed to meet the requirements of the New Bus Grant announced in the Transport Act 1968. This government grant initially covered 25% of the first cost of grant-compliant buses used on local bus services, from 1971 this was increased to 50%.
By the end of 1970 a further 46 chassis had been built, bodied and delivered. Production then rose to a peak of 109 (including the second prototype) in 1971, dropping back slightly in 1972 to 99 then only 13 were delivered in 1973 and six in 1974, so 76% of chassis were built in two years, the municipal market was moving back toward double decks and the rival Leyland National was outselling every other single-deck bus.
Production ceased in March 1974 after 274 were completed, the last chassis numerically were numbers 56041/2Hillditch (1981), p. 112 which were ordered by Huddersfield and delivered to West Yorkshire PTE in September and October 1974 respectively (registered PVH 452/453M).
Customers From 1966-9 Pennine had bodied increasing numbers of rear-engined single deck buses, and by the time body production ended in 1975 they had, besides the RU, bodied AEC Swifts, Daimler Fleetlines, Leyland Atlanteans and Leyland Panthers, but the largest number of home-market Pennine bodies on third-party chassis had gone on Bristol RELL and RESL, with Reading Corporation being the largest customer with 28 bodies to its own outline on a short-wheelbase version of the RELL.Curtis (1987), pp. 50-51
The majority of customers for the RU also took the Pennine body. This was fitted to 69% of RU production (23% carried Plaxton bodies with 4% shares for both East Lancashire and Roe). It sold best in Cheshire (37%, all Crosville), Lancashire (36%, spread between one PTE, one independent, and six corporations, total also including both demonstrators) and Yorkshire (22% over one PTE, one independent and four corporations), the first customer to take delivery was Doncaster Corporation who took their first fourteen in the early months of 1970 Huddersfield Corporation also had short, dual-door versions in service with H registrations (thus registered prior to 1 August 1970),Parke (August 1970), "Pictureview", p. 309 (top) Lancashire United were the third customer to get H-registration examples, their first twenty. Huddersfield were to take 22 and Doncaster 25. Other municipal customers included Accrington Corporation (5), Blackburn Corporation (6), Halifax Joint Omnibus Committee (3), Burnley, Colne and Nelson JOC (20), Darlington Corporation (8), Lytham St Annes (6), Morecambe Corporation (6), Rotherham Corporation (9) and Southampton Corporation (5).
Accrington and Blackburn took East Lancashire bodies on theirs, Halifax and Rotherham chose Plaxton Derwent II bodies as did Huddersfield for its final two and the rest took the Pennine Coachcraft option. The final 11 for Doncaster were the only ones with Charles H Roe bodies.
Due to central government legislation English and Welsh county and borough council boundaries were changed and from 1974 metropolitan counties were created in England in the West Midlands, Greater Manchester, Merseyside, Tyne and Wear, South Yorkshire and West Yorkshire. Most of the metropolitan areas already had passenger transport executives but these were established in the two metropolitan Yorkshire counties (which together comprised the majority of the historic West Riding) thus South Yorkshire absorbed the Rotherham and Doncaster RUs and West Yorkshire the Halifax/Calderdale and Huddersfield vehicles.
Outside the metropolitan counties, local government changes caused some fleets to merge (e.g. Lancaster with Morecambe & Heysham, Blackburn with Darwen) while others were renamed, Burnley, Colne and Nelson becoming Burnley & Pendle and Accrington changing title to Hyndburn.
Independent customers for the RU were headed by Lancashire United Transport (LUT) of Atherton who took delivery of fifty over 1970-1. These had a special version of the Plaxton Derwent II body supplied only to this operator featuring flat rather than curved windscreens, deleting peaks on front and rear domes and having glazing and general appearance similar to Plaxton's previous (1958–66) Highway bus body. They also had front-mounted radiators, specified by the operator and unique to their RUs. As well as being fitted to the fifty RU which were dual-door 40-seaters on short chassis, the same body went on two batches of Bristol RESL6G, twenty B42D in 1967/8 and ten DP41F in 1973/4. Subsequently LUT (and other outliers such as the Calderdale Region of West Yorkshire PTE) were prevailed upon to take the standard version of the Derwent II.
Other independent customers for the RU took the Pennine body, all in long single-door form with 51 bus seats; these were Garelochhead Coach Services (1), Dodds (AA Service) Troon (2), Grahams Bus Service of Paisley (1), and Reliance of Sutton on the Forest, North Yorkshire (2).
When the second National Bus Company order table was published on 30 July 1970 tabulating orders for subsidiaries in 1971 the biggest surprises were two orders each calling for 100 single-deck buses. Midland Red (whose last home-built BMMO bus had just been delivered) ordered 100 Ford R192 with 45-seat Plaxton Derwent II bodies, whilst Crosville ordered 100 Seddon Pennine RU complete with Pennine Coachcraft bodies.Parke (October 1970), p. 392
Crosville's Pennine RU were all to 36 ft length, the order broke into two sub-batches of fifty, half were single door with 47 coach seats for long limited-stop journeys and half were 45 seat dual-door buses for intensive urban operations. Crosville had taken the last of its 593 Bristol Lodekkas in 1968 Curtis (2009 and was concentrating on renewing its single-deck fleet, which at the time still included a few half-cab Bristol L-types, it did not order its first VRs until 1975. It ordered 288 REs between 1964 and 1973. Curtis (1987) Seddon started delivering this (joint) record order for complete buses in April 1971 and completed it just over a year later in May 1972.
The final RU to be delivered to a new customer was equipped with a Chloride sponsored battery-electric driveline and was called the "Silent Rider". It was sold to SELNEC who numbered it EX61 in its experimental series, registering it XVU387M. The Chloride battery pack weighed four tonnes and the vehicle (unladen but for those batteries) weighed 13 tonnes (almost double the unladen weight of the Gardner-powered version) so payload was limited, by the axles fitted, to one tonne which equalled a capacity of B41D + 9 standing and although it featured regenerative braking the bus (like Lucas battery-electric Seddon Midi EX62 XVU364M which followed in 1975) was not a success. The Silent Rider project alone cost £100,000 at mid-1970s values, promotional tours to Sheffield and Chicago, Illinois, United States may have been prestigious for the Executive and for the manufacturers of vehicle and batteries, who were both major employers of voters in the PTE area, but Cook County Transit and the South Yorkshire PTE were, lacking the electrical-charging and cell-care infrastructure installed in a Manchester garage as part of the project, able to get even less use out of the thing than Greater Manchester who tried to employ its advertised 100-mile range by using it sporadically on one morning and one afternoon peak-time journey on routes 202/3. It was out of service by 1976.
In service