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Like
the railway industry in the nineteenth century, Britain was a
major player in supplying the world with buses, particularly
double-deckers. The principal contributors in the mid-twentieth century
were AEC, Daimler and Leyland Motors. Buses were exported throughout
the world as complete vehicles or as a chassis with locally assembled
bodywork completing the bus.
As early as 1911, Leyland Motors sold five single-deck charabancs to
Lisbon Tramways and three to Cape Town Electric Tramways. It says
something for the endurance of the British-built chassis when examples
of the Daimler CVG in Hong Kong and the AEC Regent III in Lisbon both
managed to attain well over twenty-five years of service for their
respective operators. As London Transport found itself with a surfeit
of serviceable buses in the 1960s, hundreds of redundant RTs, RTLs and
RTWs were snapped up by the Ceylon Transport Board. Redundant
Atlanteans and Daimler Fleetlines found favour with both KMB and CMB
while sixty AEC Swifts saw further service with the Public Transport
Association (PTA) and the Education Department on the island of Malta.
This book features previously unpublished photographs of British buses in China, South Africa, Portugal and Hong Kong.