The announcement this year that Alexander Dennis is suspending production of Plaxton Leopard and Panther coaches for two years to allow the Scarborough factory to meet demand for new electric buses makes all the more timely Howard Berry’s survey of the coaches it built between 1958 and 1976.
While we may hope that suspension really means suspension and the last British manufacturer of coaches does start building them again in 2026, this book is a reminder of how the market and Plaxton’s fortunes have changed. Berry points out that Plaxton built just over 1,300 bodies in 1973, most of them coaches. That was typical of the time as Duple, building around 1,100, met most of the remaining demand. Annual sales of new coaches have halved since then and in 2019, immediately before the pandemic, Plaxton sold about one tenth of the numbers it moved 46 years earlier.
With 180 photographs from Alan Snatt, Martyn Hearson and Richard Simons, this informative colour album shows the designs with which Plaxton overtook Duple to become market leader, reminding us of frequent styling changes (and model names with Roman numeral suffixes) to persuade operators that they needed to update their fleets with that year’s new…
