The Dushanbe trolleybus system forms part of the public transport network of Dushanbe, the capital and largest city of Tajikistan. In operation since 1955, the system presently comprises eight routes.
A trolleybus is an electric bus that draws power from overhead wires using spring-loaded trolley poles. Two wires and poles are required to complete the electrical circuit. This differs from a tram or streetcar, which normally uses the track as the return path, needing only one wire and one pole. They are also distinct from other kinds of electric buses, which usually rely on batteries. Power is most commonly supplied as 600-volt direct current, but there are exceptions.
Public transport is transport of passengers by group travel systems available for use by the general public, typically managed on a schedule, operated on established routes, and that charge a posted fee for each trip. Examples of public transport include city buses, trolleybuses, trams and passenger trains, rapid transit and ferries. Public transport between cities is dominated by airlines, coaches, and intercity rail. High-speed rail networks are being developed in many parts of the world.
Dushanbe is the capital and largest city of Tajikistan. Dushanbe means Monday in the Tajik language, the local language is Tajik language. It was named this way because it grew from a village that originally had a popular market on Mondays. As of 2016, Dushanbe had a population of 802,700.
The development of electric transport in Dushanbe (then called Stalinabad) was authorised on 6 April 1955, when, according to decision no 106 of the Stalinabad City Council executive committee, a trolleybus management agency was established.[2]
On 1 May 1955, amidst great festivities, the first city trolleybuses operated the inaugural services along the main thoroughfare of the republic - then named Lenin Avenue (now Rudaki Prospect). They were Engels MTB-82D trolleybuses, produced at the Uritskogo plant. The first route extended only 11km (7mi) from the city centre, and ran from via Lenin Avenue to the railway station.[2]
Rudaki Avenue is the main thoroughfare street in Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan. The street is named after the Rudaki, the Tajik national poet. The street was known as Lenin Avenue during the Soviet period, and used to host a statue of V. I. Lenin. The street received its current name in the summer of 1992.
In 1957, line no 2 was opened, and in 1958 line no 3. By the time the second trolleybus depot was commissioned in 1967, the length of the overhead wire network had increased to 49km (30mi). There were nine routes, 65 trolleybuses, and 700 workers.[2]
With the collapse of the Soviet Union and disruption of oil supplies that periodically occurred in Tajikistan in the 1990s, urban transport in Dushanbe experienced significant problems. The fleet of conventional buses all but ceased to exist, and therefore the main forms of passenger transport in the streets were trolleybuses. During the oil shortage, all the existing electric rolling stock was pressed into service, including maintenance trucks and KTH-1 trolleybuses produced by the Kiev electric factory. The number of trolleybuses that were in operation in the late 1980s had reached 250 ZiU-682 vehicles; by the end of the 1990s, the fleet had declined to 45-50 units and the route network had shrunk.[2]
The Soviet Union, officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), was a socialist state in Eurasia that existed from 30 December 1922 to 26 December 1991. Nominally a union of multiple national Soviet republics, its government and economy were highly centralized. The country was a one-party state, governed by the Communist Party with Moscow as its capital in its largest republic, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. Other major urban centres were Leningrad, Kiev, Minsk, Alma-Ata, and Novosibirsk. It spanned over 10,000 kilometres east to west across 11 time zones, and over 7,200 kilometres north to south. It had five climate zones: tundra, taiga, steppes, desert and mountains.
Kiev or Kyiv is the capital and most populous city of Ukraine, located in the north-central part of the country on the Dnieper. The population in July 2015 was 2,887,974, making Kiev the 7th most populous city in Europe.
Since independence, Tajikistan has acquired 27 second hand trolley buses, each a minimum of 10 years old. In an effort to maintain existing rolling stock made in the mid-1990s, a batch of trolleybuses was sent to Kazakhstan for major repairs at the Alma-Ata tram and trolleybus plant, but due to a lack of funding they were never repaired, and there was no money to "return" them back to Dushanbe.[2]
Kazakhstan, officially the Republic of Kazakhstan, is the world's largest landlocked country, and the ninth largest in the world, with an area of 2,724,900 square kilometres (1,052,100 sq mi). It is a transcontinental country largely located in Asia; the most western parts are in Europe. Kazakhstan is the dominant nation of Central Asia economically, generating 60% of the region's GDP, primarily through its oil and gas industry. It also has vast mineral resources.
In summer 2000, to solve the problem of updating the Dushanbe trolleybus fleet, Ikarus 260 and Ikarus 280 bus bodies, intended for conversion into trolleybuses, were delivered to the 1st trolleybus depot. The task of designing and installing power equipment was assigned to the leading electrician at the depot, N.H. Salahitdinovu. His crew of mechanics and electricians coped with the task - six buses were converted to trolleybuses during 2001 - giving them two extra years of service life.[2]
On 9 September 2004, the mayor of Dushanbe, Mahmadsayid Ubaydullayev, and the CEO of the Russian JSC "Trolza-Market", Paul Berlin, signed a contract for the procurement of 100 new trolley buses to meet Dushanbe's public transport needs. The first deliveries of new trolleybuses under this contract began in the summer and autumn of 2005, and the last, one hundredth, machine arrived in April 2006. With the commissioning of the new machines, older trolleybuses in the fleet were withdrawn.[2]
Services
Pushing a Dushanbe trolleybus.
As of 2006, Dushanbe had eight trolleybus lines: nos 1, 2, 4, 5, 8, 10, 12 and 14.
The Dushanbe trolleybus system has a few operational features that have become conventional in recent years.
As of 2017 the first concerns the method of payment for travel and loading procedures. Each serving trolleybus has a crew of 2 persons. One is the driver and the second one collects the ticket fee and remounts the collector in case it jumps off. A ticket costs currently 1 Somoni for an adult.
Due to the significant deterioration of the overhead wire network, the current collectors come down frequently. The ticket person is therefore trained and able to remount the collectors in less than one minute.
Fleet
Trolza ZiU-682-016 on route no 4.
As at August 2011, the current fleet of Dushanbe trolleybuses was based upon the standard ZiU-9 trolleybus design:
Societatea de Transport București, is the main public transit operator in Bucharest, Romania, owned by the Municipality of Bucharest.
Tajik Air, legally State Unitary Aviation Enterprise, was an airline in Tajikistan. It had its head office at Dushanbe International Airport in Dushanbe. The airline had its main hub at Dushanbe International Airport, and it retained a secondary focus city at Khujand's Khudzhand Airport. It ceased operations in January 2019 as the then eighth-oldest airline worldwide.
The ZiU-5 is a Soviet trolleybus model that was built by the Uritsky factory. The ZiU acronym stands for Zavod imeni Uritskogo, which translates as Plant named after Uritskiy. This model of city trolleybus was in mass production from 1959 to 1972. The total number of ZiU-5s produced exceeded 14,500 vehicles. This allowed the ZiU-5 to become dominant model of trolleybus in Soviet towns and cities of that time. The last vehicles were withdrawn from active service in the mid-1980s. The small number of surviving vehicles are kept now for museum purposes.
Dushanbe International Airport is an airport in Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan. It is the a main hub for Somon Air and was the home base for now defunct Tajik Air, which also had its head office on the property.
ZiU-9, or ZIU-9 is a Soviet trolleybus vehicle. Other names and indexes for the same vehicle include ZiU-682 and HTI-682. The ZiU acronym stands for Zavod imeni Uritskogo, which is a plant named after Moisei Uritsky, the Russian revolutionary. Before 1996 this acronym was also a trademark of the vehicle manufacturer. It has been changed to Trolza. The ZiU-9 was put in mass production in 1971 and it was still assembled along with other more advanced trolleybus vehicles in the Trolza factory until 2014. The total number of produced ZiU-9s exceeds 42,000 vehicles. In addition, many copies of ZiU-9 were made in other factories of the former Soviet bloc. This model is the most numerous trolleybus vehicle in the world.
The Košice public transit system operates in Košice, Slovakia. Services are managed by the Dopravný podnik mesta Košice (DPMK), or Košice Transit Company.
Trolza, formerly known as the Uritsky factory or simply Uritsky, is a trolleybus manufacturer in Russia, located in Engels, Saratov oblast. In the Soviet era it was known as ZiU or Uritsky factory.
The Milan trolleybus system is part of the public transport network of Milan, Italy. In operation since 1933, the system presently comprises four routes.
The Sofia trolleybus system forms part of the public transport network of Sofia, the capital city of Bulgaria.
The Ulaanbaatar trolleybus system forms part of the public transport network in Ulaanbaatar, the capital city of Mongolia. It is Mongolia's only trolleybus system.
The Yerevan trolleybus system forms part of the public transport network in Yerevan, the capital city of Armenia. Since the closure of the Gyumri trolleybus system in 2005, it has been Armenia’s only trolleybus system.
The Córdoba trolleybus system is part of the public transport network in Córdoba, the capital city of Córdoba Province, Argentina.
The Lucerne trolleybus system forms part of the public transport network of Lucerne, capital city of the canton of Lucerne, Switzerland. Opened in 1941, the system had replaced the Lucerne tramway network by 1961.
The Mingachevir trolleybus system was a system of trolleybuses forming part of the public transport arrangements in Mingachevir, the fourth most populous city in Azerbaijan, for about 15 years at the turn of the 21st century.
The Sumqayit trolleybus system was a system of trolleybuses forming part of the public transport arrangements in Sumqayit, the third most populous city in Azerbaijan, for most of the second half of the 20th century.
The Ganja trolleybus system was a system of trolleybuses forming part of the public transport arrangements in Ganja, the second most populous city in Azerbaijan, for most of the second half of the 20th century.
The Nakhchivan trolleybus system was a system of trolleybuses forming part of the public transport arrangements in Nakhchivan, the capital of the eponymous Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic of Azerbaijan, for nearly 20 years from 1986.
The Baku trolleybus system was a system of trolleybuses forming part of the public transport arrangements in Baku, the capital city of Azerbaijan, for about 65 years from 1941.
The Schaffhausen trolleybus system is part of the public transport network of Schaffhausen, capital city of the canton of Schaffhausen, Switzerland. It is also Switzerland's youngest and smallest such system.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
![Public transport shared transport[ation] service that is available for use by the general public; usually of passengers but sometimes of goods](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0b/R160A_E_Train_entering_World_Trade_Center.jpg/320px-R160A_E_Train_entering_World_Trade_Center.jpg)
