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Was it made in 1989 like the other ZiUs in Burgas? How many of them are there in the city?
Actually, I don't know anymore whether all of them are built and delivered then. An older public transport fan than me told me that there were two deliveries and all of the ZiUs are second hand from "brother" cities and he su[[osed that they are from Krasnodar. And. actually, there wasn't a purchase. They were exchanged. We gave 5 planes full of tomatoes and puree of tomato, they gave us the trolleybuses. One of my classmates knows personally one of the two drivers of 15050. His name is Ivan, but we call him "Vankata". When Vankata talks about his colleague, he always calls him "The Turk". I bet the drivers will be glad to see their vehicle in this site, but I don't think they'll ever see it. Now there are 13 ZiUs running for sure - 15005, 15095, 15073, 15027, 15084, 15095, 15132, 15165, 15143, 15176, 15198, 15120 and 15038. I don't know anything about 15187. Last time I saw him it was about three weeks ago, when it got spoilt and the KamAZ came to pull it. 15016 was scrapped last Autumn. I found somewhere the number of the ZiUs, supplied in Bulgaria and it was written that 20 pieces have been delivered to us. I don't know though their vehicle numbers. The problem is that all of the ZiUs have been repainted from the inside and from the outside at least once and some kind of idiots had put paint on the tables, wherre it's written the year the trolleybus was built. Fortunately, this didn't happen to 15073 and 15050. I haven't been able to read the table of 15050, but still managed to see that 15073 was built in 1989, so I supposed that the other ZiUs are also built in this year.
Thank you for your answer . Maybe they were just planned for a Russian city, but never runned there and came here as brand new vehicles - it would have been very strange for Bulgaria to import second hand trolleybuses from the USSR, especially in the years when COMECON still existed. Do you remember what was their original colour on the outside? Were they all with the same colours?
I wasn't born when they were delivered, but I have memories from the second half of the nineties and I even dare say that now they are better than then. The seats were the original and not the plastic ones they have today, but there were many of them which were torn and you could see the "dunapren" as we call it on Bulgarian (don't know the english word) and even the timber which the "dunapren" was put on. From the outside they were far more rusty than now and all of them had plastic glasses on the back windows, which were never clean, so noone could see through them. And when they broke up, the people from the maintainance were SEWING THEM WITH THREAD. What I remember about the colors is that some of them were oreange, while the others were red. There were some exceptions - there was one, which was brown, and I still remember that 15005 was white with lines from various colors in the front and a picture of 15027 the way it looked like then, you can see posted by Adamiec. 15084 was repaired around the year 2000 and came back with taillights and seats from Ikarus, which it still has today, but most of all it was blue. Then 15016, 15132 and 15187 got blue too. In the years 2004-2006 I think all of the ZiUs were repainted and repaired, some of them for the first time (15005 and 15027), while others for at least second time (15084, 15187). Now only 15084 has soft seats, but the plastic seats ones that the others have aren't so discomfortable after all - I prefer to sit on them instead of on a seat of Berna or Mercedes O305 (which doesn't mean ZiU is better than Berna and O305, of course). The problem now is that I don't know how exactly the most of the ZiUs look, because they were repainted in a very different way than before the repairment. At least I remember that 15050 was red with white roof, doors and lines before they put the first advetisement on it on May or June, 2006.