B.C.BOYLE
Northern Ireland was a pioneer development of public-owned transport authorities. The Northern Ireland Road Transport Board was the first such body Ireland and second only to London Transport in the United Kingdom.
The Board was set up in 1935 with responsibility for all road transport outside the Belfast urban area. It took over 687 buses, owned by 61 private operators, and over 2,000 lorries from hundreds of operators. By 1948 the Board had built up a fleet of nearly 1,000 buses and ran an efficient and impressive network of routes all over Northern Ireland.
The Author
B C Boyle is well qualified to write on this subject. As a schoolboy, he regularly used the buses of the NIRTB and its predecessors and, on leaving school, took employment with the new company. Many of the photos reproduced in this book are his own and all are from his collection. His text gives us much insight, from the inside, into the difficulties faced by the Board in its early years. The book has extensive photo coverage of the buses, the lorries and the staff employed by the NIRTB.
