BRITISH BUSES 1945-1975

FODEN

FODEN
The Foden chassis of 1945 was a massively rigid affair, with cross-bracing in the centre. The tin front was ahead of its time and was a much more elegant way of concealing the radiator than makers such as Daimler, Guy and Leyland achieved in the early 1950s.

PVD SERIES (1945-56)

The Foden PVD was announced in August 1945 as a 26ft double-deck chassis of broadly conventional layout. However, it featured a very strong frame with diagonal bracing, a four-speed or five-speed constant-mesh gearbox mounted in unit with the engine, and a Lockheed full-pressure hydraulic braking system. It was also ahead of its time by coming with a tin front of curved panels concealing the radiator. The engine options were the Gardner 5LW (PVD5 chassis) or 6LW (PVD6 chassis). When the latter was fitted, it protruded into the lower passenger cabin by just over six inches. The fivespeed gearbox option had an ultra-low crawler gear for steep hill work. There were two changes to the range in 1948, when a 30ft chassis became available for export and the new Foden FD6 engine was added to the options. This was a 4.09-litre six-cylinder two-stroke diesel fitted with a Roots-type supercharger and developing 126bhp. Only one PVD chassis was built with this engine, and had the PVDE6 designation. After an initial flurry of interest, home market orders for the PVD chassis simply dried up. A total of 450 were built, of which 75 went for export.

oden was a well-established truck maker with headquarters at Sandbach in Cheshire, whose plans to put a bus chassis into production were interrupted by the war. However, they announced availability of a new double-deck chassis in 1945 and followed this a year later with a single-deck derivative. Both were sturdily constructed in the Foden tradition, but proved too expensive to attract buyers in quantity. Most operators were also too inherently conservative

to go for the unusual supercharged two-stroke diesel engine that became available in 1948. From 1950, there was also an advanced rearengined single-deck chassis, but this again failed to attract many buyers. More than 650 Foden buses had been built by the time the company decided to pull out of the PSV market in 1956 an average of about 65 a year but they were rarely seen outside certain areas in the UK.

Welsh Metal Industries entered the bus bodybuilding business immediately after the war, and constructed a number of light-alloy double-deckers for local operators. This one was on the Foden PVD6 chassis.

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