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Only thoughts in fact Some articles in the press appeared the last days that claimed that 30 new trolleys would be bought. But we do not believe in these words any more. Why? Because for at least five years there have been at least three denied orders (not sure for the English term) for new trolleybuses. First Belkommunmash (we were not very sorry for this), than Solaris (I read your comment under the picture of the Trollino in Opava, but I'm not very sure wheater I've undersood it properly) that bulit even two trolleys, but they never came to Sofia. This year there was a contract with MAN, but again nothing happened. In this five years what we recieved were the eight trolleys from Innsbruck. Finally popped up a "Bulgarian made" prototype using Den Oudsten body. In the last few months it went for test runs in most of the cities with trolleybus transportation... Besides there were plans to use a repair plant for buses and trolleys in the city bearing the funny name Dupnitsa for building new Russian trolleybuses for Bulgarian market. But yet we have no info for the realisation of these ideas.
In fact the good old Ikaruses present themselves well having in mind the awful maintenance in Bulgaria. Of all 156 units delivered (1985-1988) only 15-20 have been scrapped.
That's all nice, but the youngest of these are now 20 years old. Someone will have to figure out what to replace them with and soon. Solaris trolleys are probably a bit expensive (yes, the ones for Sofia did land in Opava in the end), but could it be possible to recycle the electric equipment from your Ikaruses and put it back into new trolley bodies? Gdynia in Poland has much experience with it - they have already taken a lot of old Jelcz electrics, scrapped the bodies, and installed the motors into second hand low-floor mercedes buses. Perhaps Sofia could do the same...
This is an interesting idea. I didn't know that it is possible. Maybe we can install Ganz equipment on the Den Oudsten bodies. Here http://avtobusi.com/cgi-bin/e-cms/vis/vis.pl?s=001&p=0087&n=000013&g= is some info about the new prototype. I think Den Oudsten doesn't exist any more, but Bulgarian company RTK bought ones of the last bodies as sets which it can assemble in Bulgaria. PS: Sorry for my mistakes in the last comment
First of, don't apologise for mistakes. If I don't understand you, I'll let you know - so far so good Secondly, I'm sure you can put equipment from an Ikarus into almost any low-floor bus. So, the idea would be to buy just bodies (either new or slightly used), renew the electrical equipment from the Ikarus, then put it into the new body - that way both the body and electrics will be dead in around 10-15 years, and only THEN will you have to seriously start thinking about PROPER new trolleys. Pics of such transplants from Gdynia, Poland and Szeged in Hungary: http://www.phototrans.eu/2415,132,16,0,f.html ; http://www.phototrans.eu/14,23637,0.html ; http://hampage.hu/kozlekedes/szeged14/e_index.html (scroll down)
Thanks for these links! These trolleybuses look really nice. We hope that Sofia municipality will have in mind this possibility for modernisation of the trolleybus fleet.
In case they have doubts, even Wellington in NZ just did that sort of manoeuvre recently. It's not about how much money you've got, it's about how prudish you are with it. Electric equipment from trolleybuses isn't much different from that of a tram, and so it can easily survive 40 or even 50 years. A bus body, on the other hand, can only do 25 years at best - it just makes sense.