Old Wooden Bus Similar to those Operated by the Batangas Transportation Company

Photo extracted from "The Philippine Island World, a Physical, Cultural and Regional Geography."

The photograph above shows an antiquated bus of the Laguna Tayabas Transportation Company, sister company of the Batangas Transportation Company or BTCo, driving through the poblacion of an unidentified town. It has been extracted from a digital copy of the book entitled “The Philippine Island World, a Physical, Cultural and Regional Geography¹,” which was published in the year 1967.

In the book, the picture was captioned: “The anatomy of the ‘country bus’ is clearly shown in this photo of the Laguna-Tayabas bus company vehicle. The wooden body is built on a truck chassis. Each row of seats is entered from the right, and extra short haul passengers may stand on the lower running board. The ticket-taker² works along the running board. At the rear is a cargo section. This company maintains a scheduled set of runs from Manila southward throughout Laguna and Batangas provinces, to Lucena on Tayabas Gulf, and to Mauban and Atimonan on the east coast of Central Luzon.”

Buses of this type could still be seen on the roads of Batangas as “recently” as the 1970s.

Notes and references:
¹ “The Philippine Island World, a Physical, Cultural and Regional Geography,” by Frederick L. Wernstedt and J. E. Spencer, published 1967 in the United States, online at the Internet Archive.
² The “ticket-taker” is what is called locally, to this day, as the “bus conductor.”

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