Wayne Corporation

The Wayne Corporation was an American manufacturer of buses and other vehicles sold under the Wayne marque, with headquarters in Richmond, Indiana. Its origins reach back to 1837, when the Witt family set up a foundry in Dublin, Indiana, and its first vehicle in 1868 was a horse-drawn utility wagon. Across nearly 160 years it passed through several owners and names, including Divco, Indian Head and the Thyssen-Bornemisza Group, and in the mid-twentieth century it was a leading producer of school buses in North America. Wayne introduced the first school bus built on a cutaway van chassis, the Busette, and its Lifeguard body of 1973 used continuous longitudinal panels that helped pave the way for federal school bus safety standards. After 1980 it struggled in a market with overcapacity, declared bankruptcy and discontinued operations in 1992, and the brand was briefly revived as Wayne Wheeled Vehicles.