British Buses in Portugal

- Blurb -

From 1940 until the mid-1970s Britain supplied Portugal with many of its bus chassis. In the capital city of Lisbon, the local operator was CCFL who were the first buyer of heavyweight British-built bus chassis. Between 1947 and 1949 some 141 single-deckers were placed in service, mostly being AEC Regal IIIs, but with a smattering of Leyland OPS1s, Albion Valkyries and Maudslay Marathons. Many of the AECs were rebodied in the 1960s. The first double-deckers were two Leyland Titan PD1As arriving in 1947, but from 1950 a large fleet of AEC Regent III and Vs were purchased with the last ones arriving in 1967 as integral UTIC-AECs. All of these looked like typical British municipal buses. Small batches of Guy Conquest and AEC Reliances single-deckers arrived in the 1960s while between 1967 and 1972 fifty-five Daimler Fleetlines were purchased, but these were the final British chassis built for Lisbon.With a wonderful array of photographs, David Harvey tells the story of British buses in both Lisbon and Portugal as a whole, documenting a period where the public transport of Portugal would have seemed familiar to any British tourist.