Custom Denning

Custom Denning is an Australia'n bus manufacturer owned by Scott Dunn whose family also own Diamond bus. Scott moved to Australia in 2013 first purchasing and developing  Telford’s Bus & Coach an existing bus and coach based in Sydney. More recently he purchased  two established Australian bus and coach manufacturers Custom Bus and Denning Manufacturing which have been combinedinto a single business called Custom Denning.  Custom Denning is now Australia's oldest bus manufacturer and has started building low floor electric buses. Custom Denning aspire to get into the European bus market and with the need for a number of low floor electric buses in the UK using the Rotala fleet was seen as a way to achieve this. In 2023 the government invited bids from bus operators for funding to introduce more low floor electric buses. Rotala put in bids for vehicles in both their East and West Midland businesses as well as in their Preston Operation.  It was proposed all these new electric vehicles would be manufactured by Custom Denning. The bid consisted of 14 new buses for Diamond Bus in the West Midlands for use on its services 4H and 45, 10 new buses for Preston Bus  for services 19 and 100, and six electric buses for Diamond East Midlands services 8 & 9 in Staffordshire and south Derbyshire. In the event the Preston and West Midlands bids were unsuccessful as a result only six buses were ordered for the Burton on Trent operation. This was latter increased to eight buses. In addition three buses were purchased for use on Heathrow Airport services in the Diamond South East operation as well as a single vehicle for the West Midlands.

39001    

39901 entered service with Diamond Bus at their Tividale deport on Wednesday 18th June 2025. Being new vehicles types for the UK Rotala had to get type approval for these Custom Denning buses so that the certificate of initial fitness could be issued. As with all new vehicle types the first vehicles have to go through a period of testing to get type approval. This then allowed the initial batch of Custom Denning vehicles to enter service. This included 39001 which would have been a batch of 14 vehicles for the West Midlands. As the bid to Government was unsuccessful Diamond purchased a single vehicle for the West Midlands operation and is normally used on the Service 45 from West Bromwich to Walsall alongside 3 other diesel powered vehicles.