The Leyland Titan was a forward-control chassis with a front-mounted engine designed to carry double-decker bus bodywork. It was built mainly for the United Kingdom market between 1927 and 1942, and between 1945 and 1969.
The type was widely used in the United Kingdom and it was also successful in export markets, with numerous examples shipped to Australia, Ireland, India, Spain, South Africa and many other countries. From 1946 specific export models were introduced, although all Titans were right-hand drive regardless of the rule of the road in customer countries.
After Leyland ended the production of the Leyland Titan in UK, Ashok Leyland of India took up production and marketed the bus in South Asia as the Ashok Leyland Titan, which, in much developed form, is still in production.
Origin Prior to 1924 Leyland Motors and the majority of other British commercial vehicle makers had used similar chassis frames for bus and lorry chassis, generally a simple straight ladder-type steel frame. The disadvantage for bus applications was that the saloon floor was relatively high, which gave passengers access difficulties and also caused stability and overall height problems if a double-deck was to be fitted with a top deck cover, as was increasingly becoming common on double-deck trams in the UK and had been first used on buses by Widnes Corporation in 1909. When the London General Omnibus Company, part of the Underground Electric Railways of London Group, proposed a closed-top double-decker to the group's vehicle-building subsidiary the Associated Equipment Company in 1923, the model 405 was produced, forming General's NS class; this had a frame with side members upswept over the axle mounting points so that the lower saloon floor level was about one foot lower than the preceding types 301 (K-class) and 401 (S-class). However, the Metropolitan Police, who then had the statutory responsibility for London bus construction and safety rules, refused the fitting of covered top decks on the NS class for a number of years after its introduction. Initially the NS was built exclusively for the Underground Group, and certain features – such as the four-cylinder side-valve engine and three-speed chain-drive constant-mesh transmission – were obsolescent. In 1924 Maudslay of Coventry also introduced a swept-down chassis frame on a comprehensive range of purpose-built passenger models called the ML series, although no double-deckers were catalogued until 1930.Kaye (1970) pp156–8
In 1925 Leyland Motors followed suit. Unlike the competitors they had a dropped-frame double-deck model for general sale; and unlike them Leyland decided to publicise their new range of dedicated passenger models by giving them names. The single-deck chassis were named after animals, ranging in size from the 20–23-seat Leveret, then the 26–30-seat Lioness, the 32–36-seat Lion and finally the 38-seat Leopard. The double-deck on the other-hand adopted the mythical name Leviathan, designed for up to 48 seats, the same as the NS. Pneumatic tyre development for commercial vehicles was in its early stages and so although the single-deckers were designed for these, standard equipment for the Leviathan was six solid rubber tyres, two on the front axle and four on the back.Jack (1984) pp59–61
The Leviathan was not the worst seller in the range (Leverets sold around 40 and two Leopards were sold) most entered service fitted with covered tops, but unlike AEC with its captive market within the Underground Group, Leyland had to sell against competitors, and around 60 Leviathans were sold into 1927, most to municipal operators in Lancashire and Cheshire, with the largest private-sector operator being Crosville.
The majority of the UK's electric tramways had come into being about a quarter of a century earlier, and the cost of maintenance of track and the surrounding highway, as well as the cost of maintaining the overhead wiring and the generation, transmission & substation network was affecting profitability. Although the majority of tramways were owned by local councils, some were in the private sector; and although sale of electricity to domestic consumers was beginning to develop as a profit centre, the inflexibility of operation made providing new or extended routes expensive, and on-road boarding began to be seen as obstructive of other road traffic and increasingly dangerous. Although the tramcar was in general a durable vehicle and capable of much re-engineering, standards varied and by 1925 some networks were thoroughly worn out.
During 1925–26 Guy Motors and Karrier, the motor-vehicle subsidiary of the Clayton Engineering company of Huddersfield, promoted the six-wheel double-deck bus as the answer to those seeking to replace the double-deck tram. Unlike the Leviathan or the NS they ran as standard on pneumatic tyres, with two such at the end of all three axles, and at up to long, where local construction regulations permitted (there were none nationally at the time; rules were set by local councils, watch-committees or, in London, the Metropolitan Police) passenger capacity could equal or exceed that of double-deck trams. Other builders, AEC in particular (at the time in a collaboration deal with Daimler Company), followed suit, getting the drawing offices to stretch existing buses into three-axle versions.
Leyland, in particular, thought differently, and with the Lion becoming the best-selling single deck bus and coach in Britain – the "long Lion" from early 1926 proving particularly successful – almost 3,000 Lions and Lionesses (which differed only in driving position) sold by the end of the L-series three-year run, returning Leyland to profitability after catastrophic losses in the early 1920s. Leyland's chairman Henry Spurrier (the second) decided to recruit design talent to give Leyland not just a temporary advantage but long-term technical and sales supremacy. He appointed G.J. "John" Rackham in the summer of 1926 as Leyland's chief engineer and commissioned from him a complete new product range, to start with a new double-deck bus. He did this because AEC now had enough capacity to offer their 420-series double-decker (similar to the NS but with a more conventional sliding-mesh gearbox) on general sale, which with AEC's ability to loss-lead on price given its large guaranteed London orders would spell the death of the Leviathan and also because of the threat from the promoters of big six-wheelers.
Rackham had worked for AEC in the pre-World War I period. He was involved in the design of London General's B-Type bus, under Frank Searle and then George Green. During World War I he and Green worked on the Tank along with other gifted engineers such as Walter Wilson. After the war Rackham moved to the United States and under Green was chief designer for John Hertz's Yellow Coach Company, one of the leading bus-builders in the States. Rackham, under Green's direction, evolved a range of fast, relatively light chassis with powerful engines and a trademark of frames gracefully swept with elegantly varying side-member depth. The Y and Z models also had off-set underslung worm rear-axles and six-cylinder overhead-camshaft (OHC) petrol engines; OHC was not generally known in UK buses at the time, and six-cylinder engines likewise.
The only known Yellow Coach imported into the UK was fitted out in 1927 as a directors' saloon, for the use of Lord Ashfield and other directors of the Underground group. It was a luxurious mobile boardroom and pictures of it (inside and out) are available on the London Transport Museum website.
London General Omnibus Company also imported a Yellow Coach, Model Z-A-199 double deck chassis in December 1924 which was fitted with a single deck bus body and registered as no. XY 9869. Five photos of this bus, listed as '1925 LGOC saloon motor coach or charabanc', are also in the London Transport Museum Photographic collection (photo Nos. 559-563 of 5295). Both the Model Y chassis (including Lord Ashfield's 'directors' saloon') and the Model Z were designed by Rackham.Yellow Coach Manufacturing Co. Model Z Double Deck Production and Delivery Details. Date nk
Pre-war
TD1
The first of Rackham's new T-Type Leylands was the double-deck bus. This was the Titan TD. Rackham's use of mythological names for double-decks and animal names for single-deckers and lorries grew to be a Leyland tradition. It and the single deck Tiger TS1 equivalent were announced at the London Olympia Motor Show of 1927 after an intense development period.
"They represented an immense advance on what had gone before, either at Leyland or elsewhere. It was not so much that the features were all new — most had been seen in isolation before — but the combination of them in one vehicle and the overall concept of the vehicles set a cracking pace for competitors, which left most of them so far behind it took them years to catch up," said former AEC employee Alan Townsin.
An important feature of the new Leyland buses was the engine; it was a six-cylinder overhead-camshaft petrol engine of 6.8 litres displacement, developing between 90 and 98 bhp at up to 2,200 rpm. Other drive-line features were a single-plate clutch driving into a four-speed sliding-mesh gearbox; these were mounted as a unit with the engine. The drive-line featured subtle inclination of engine and transmission, allowing straight drive shafts into the underslung worm-wheel single-reduction rear axle – which had the differential offset to the offside to reduce gangway floor height on the lower deck. Vacuum-servo brakes on all four wheels were standard between Tiger and Titan, but the Titan had a near right-angle drop in its frame after the rearmost spring-mounting to provide a low passenger entry platform.
Leyland Motors already had its own coachworks established just after the Great War, next to Leyland in the neighbouring parish of Farington. It was on stream by 1921, and most Lions and many Lionesses had been bodied there; a pre-Rackham feature was that Leyland Motors would also license the designs to other coachworks, but would take to law those building "pirated" Leyland designs. A significant difference between these forerunners and the body for the Titan is that it was patented. It was the first lowbridge double-deck bus body and as a result of the offset upper-deck gangway with four-abreast seating to the nearside the Titan could carry 48 or more seated passengers and yet within a long body have an overall height of less than , with a covered top – a height about less than the Leviathan or the NS. A Titan on pneumatic tyres, with the standard Leyland body, weighed less than tonnes unladen. This meant that as standard a Titan could carry pneumatic tyres of the same type proven with Lions and other competitive single-deckers. Pneumatic tyres on a heavy vehicle at the time meant it could legally travel at 20 mph rather than 12 mph for solids. Not only was height and weight less than competing six-wheelers, so was price.
At this time Leyland had by far the best bus advertising in the trade press, only Albion Motors coming anywhere near. Albion sold on low first cost and fuel economy, while saying that they were "As Sure As The Sunrise" in reliability; but Leyland's advertising had the "Zoo" names to fix individual models in customers' minds, and in particular they used a photograph of the original TD1 prototype TD9522, passing underneath the mediaeval Stonebow in Lincoln with clearance to spare, which they accompanied with the slogan "Bury your trams: mark their passing with Titans." Lincoln City Transport had the first production TD1, which was exhibited at Olympia prior to delivery.