C.P.P.T.D. were the initials of the much-lamented City of Portsmouth Passenger Transport Department, and it was therefore entirely appropriate that we should have resurrected those famous initials when taking over Portsmouth City Museums’ store in Broad Street, Old Portsmouth in 1992 for the storage of not only some of our own veteran and vintage buses but also those belonging to City Museums themselves.

For the next 11 years our volunteers carried out a huge amount of restoration and renovation work on the 21 vehicles housed at Broad Street, as well as holding regular open days throughout the year when many thousands of visitors were able to see restoration work in progress and take vintage bus rides throughout Portsmouth and Southsea.

The last few years at Broad Street witnessed a tremendous struggle to extend our occupancy, including an unsuccessful Lottery bid to rebuild/refurbish the depots. Ultimately, however, our landlords decided that we had to leave so that the buildings could be demolished and the area redeveloped, so our collection went off into storage in two separate rented buildings in the Meon Valley (and, in one instance, in Somerset).

Despite the best efforts of the CPPTD management team, nowhere else in the city of Portsmouth proved acceptable either to ourselves or to the planners, but in the summer of 2006 a suitable building was found at Wicor Farm, Portchester which has been taken on a 2 year lease initially, but with a longer-term view to purchase.

CPPTD is a constituent of the Working Omnibus Museum Project Ltd, a registed educational charity no. 10204111.