Seddon's new bus factory will be busy
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• The accompanying drawing shows how the frontage of the new Seddon Motors Ltd. bus factory at Royton, Oldham, will look when it is completed in about six months' time. It is on the Oldham to Rochdale road which is scheduled for widening as part of the Oldham by-pass. The frontage of 32011 will be a combination of the existing works (on the left) where Pennine p.s.v.'s have been built for some time and a new office block and factory on the site of the old Rhos mills.
Seddon now owns the whole block of land between the new frontage and the established Woodstock Works which lies some distance behind and is devoted to the production of goods vehicles and p.s.v.. chassis. The quite separate Pennine Coachcraft Ltd. factory, a wholly owned subsidiary of Seddon, will in future be building only bodies for goods vehicles.
Construction of the new works, and important production plans to be announced shortly, is paralleled by organizational changes. Seddon Motors Ltd., which is one of several principal subsidiaries of the main Seddon Diesel Vehicles Ltd. holding company, has been divided into four divisions, each the special responsibility of a director of the Seddon Motors board. The truck division at the Woodstock Works is controlled by Mr. G. J. Redmond, the new bus division at Rhos works by Mr. D. W. Redmond, a sales division by Mr. P. J. Verdellis, and a service division by Mr. F. Galbraith. Mr. Roy Wild has taken over p.s.v. chassis design; the chief engineer, Mr. Walter Booth, remains responsible for goods chassis design.
One further change concerns nomenclature. Whereas "Pennine" has been used as a marque name for Seddon's p.s.v. chassis and complete buses, in future it will simply be a model name for p.s.v.s built by Seddon Motors bus division, and will no longer have any direct connection with the products of the Pennine Coachcraft factory.
Seddon's passenger vehicle work has expanded enormously—but quietly—in the past two years and will be given a further boost by plans soon to be revealed. At present the bus works is busy with conversion of a large batch of Liverpool's Atlantean double-deckers to one-man operation and with building Pennine IV singledeckers for British operators (notably Gosport and Fareham), while bus chassis for overseas customers are becoming a regular job for the Woodstock Works.
The Adantean conversions involve moving the staircase from front to centre and reversing it to become forward-ascending, inserting a central exit, with extensive strengthening of the body at this point, and installing new equipment such as a driver periscope for top-deck viewing.
The scale of the export work may be judged from the fact that Seddon will ship over 200 bus chassis to one market alone this year, while buses have recently been delivered to, or are on order for Australia, Bermuda, Brunei, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Guatemala, Jamaica, Malaya, Mauritius, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Salvador, Sarawak and (surprisingly) the USA. All have Perkins V8 or 6.354 diesel engines, and most have bodies built locally or assembled from British c.k.d. kits.
The new bus works, which has a return frontage of 220ft, will add about 40,000 sq. ft. to Seddon's production capacity.