Like London Transport in the time described by Ken Blacker in his book reviewed on page 92, Coras Iompair Éireann (CIÉ) opted out of the first wave of rear-engined buses but still experienced much pain when it embraced a second wave in the mid-1960s.
For Ireland’s state transport undertaking, the Atlantean was the product that broke its hitherto harmonious relationship with Leyland as it discovered — as Blacker shows that London Transport also did — that this revolutionary product was not designed as thoroughly is it ought to have been and that even a major operator could be overwhelmed as new engineering challenges unfolded by the hour, day, week and month.
As Ed O’Neill explains in his latest account of CIÉ’s Leyland double-deckers — earlier ones covered the R and RA-class Titans — Leyland first tried steering the organisation on to its new wonder bus with a two-month trial in Dublin in 1960.
The subsequent possibility of Daimler putting its rival Fleetline into the Irish capital spurred the Lancashire folk into arranging the high-profile trial of three of the improved MkII Atlantean — stylish machines from the municipal fleets of Bolton, Glasgow and Liverpool — in 1964.
That gave CIÉ the confide…
