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Trolleys in Moscow


captaintrolley

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This snippet was in today's Moscow News and was posted in a different forum.

Trolley buses under fire

Clean, economic and quiet, trolleybuses should be a boon for urban transport. But a mayoral edict from Sergei Sobyanin could see them stripped from city streets.

The large, sometimes unwieldy vehicles have been identified as a potential roadblock – largely because they can’t navigate around obstructions – and are facing cuts in numbers as part of the city’s new jam-busting plans.

But not everyone agrees, “Removing trolleybuses from the city centre is wrong,” outraged architectural historian Alexei Klimenko told Moskovsky Komsomolets. “To eliminate traffic jams you must first remove obstacles, such as incorrectly parked cars.”

So far nobody has announced how they will be replaced.

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  • 8 years later...

It was the last the last day of trolleybus service on routes 7, 17, 34 and 34K (short) not the last day of service on the whole system.  There are still about 850 trolleybuses in service but the Mayor (from a remote part of Russia) just hates the trolleybuses he found in Moscow. At current rates of route conversions, the system could close by 2021.  

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4 hours ago, martin607 said:

It was the last the last day of trolleybus service on routes 7, 17, 34 and 34K (short) not the last day of service on the whole system.  There are still about 850 trolleybuses in service but the Mayor (from a remote part of Russia) just hates the trolleybuses he found in Moscow. At current rates of route conversions, the system could close by 2021.  

Interesting. From the sounds of the posts in the Email Group, the poster made it sound like the whole system was unplugged.

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Moscow once had the largest trolleybus system in the world with ~2500 trolleybuses. The current mayor has been mounting a campaign against them for several years. The rot began in May 2016 when the majority of trolleybus routes entering the central area were converted to diesel buses. At that time the fleet was about 1500. The May 2016 closures and subsequent closures have reduced the fleet to well under 1000 trolleybuses.

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Article in Czech about the closure. https://www.cs-dopravak.cz/v-moskve-skoncily-trolejbusy-zrizena-bude-jedna-retrolinka/

Best photo in the article is one of a BKM 321 waiting to return to the depot for the last time (photo credit Alexandr Lezenko).

To be clear, we are not talking about ancient boneshakers. By July the trolleybus fleet was down to about 380 and of these about 50 were only three years old and the rest were seven to eight years old i.e. at about mid-life.

The last six routes closed without prior announcement on 24 August (last runs early hours of 25th). 5 of these were converted to diesel and only one to battery electric buses. But the battery electric buses can't cope with the heavily loaded routes. Next day there were line ups at charging stations  and ex-trolleybus route M4 was reduced from every 3 minutes to every 30 minutes.

Since the Mayor of Moscow began his destruction of the system in 2016, the fleet has been reduced to nil but only 600 battery buses have been ordered. Moreover many battery buses have in fact been put on diesel routes and 80% of trolleybus service has in fact been replaced by diesel.

There is still a lot of wiring up outside of the central core and it will take quite a while to remove it.  Strangely, there didn't seem to be much effort since 2016 to remove wiring over closed routes and sometimes brand new intersections were built for routes that weren't coming back. But demolition may now speed up.

 

Moscow last night BKM.jpg

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