THE WHOLE PICTURE

All in all, 21 prototypes and 1,815 production Standard vehicles were built on Atlantean and Fleetline chassis. being first generation rear engined chassis before development to second generation vehicles such as Leyland Olympians, Dennis Dominators, Volvo City buses and Scanias.

These deliveries basically fell into four distinct body/chassis configurations.

All these four variations were received in the initial batch of production deliveries which commenced in 1972, as follows:

This was the breakdown of the first 500 vehicles and clearly Type iii started off as the rarest group, with there being only five of these Northern Counties bodied Leyland Atlanteans. However, in later batches, three of these four types were repeated in large numbers as follows:

Type iii, which had been the rarest type initially, became the most prolific of all with a further 915 Northern Counties bodied Leyland Atlanteans being delivered. Within Type iv, although the Fleetline had its production shifted from Daimler to Leyland, it was still basically a Fleetline chassis and a further 240 of these Northern Counties bodied Fleetlines were delivered, although all single door.

In the end, as indicated above, there were a total of 1836 Standards built on first generation Leyland Atlantean and Daimler/Leyland Fleetline chassis, 21 prototypes and 1815 production vehicles. However, it was intended that more than this number would be built. Initially it was felt the sequence would go forward to 9463 as documentation has been discovered depicting fleet numbers being allocated up to this number. As matters rationalised however, orders were actually placed up to 8825, but the last 60 Atlanteans were cancelled in favour of Leyland Olympians (3026-3085), because of difficulties with their emissions and other problems in complying with European standards.

Consequently, although orders had actually been placed to take the Standard batch to 8825, being Northern Counties bodied alloy framed Atlanteans, with the 60 being cancelled with the substitute of 60 Olympians instead, the series finally ended at 8765 which is one of the vehicles that has been secured for preservation by the SELNEC Preservation Society.

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