Just after we celebrated Muni’s Heritage Weekend in San Francisco, something similar happened in Moscow, focused strictly on trolley buses. The former Soviet Union was the world center of electric transit for decades, with both trams (streetcars) and trolley buses spread across the sprawling Soviet empire. Indeed, the American-born PCC streetcar technology was widely used across the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites, usually using trams built by Tatra in then-Czechoslovakia.
One of the many restored Russian trolley buses involved in the 80th anniversary celebration. Thanks to Jeff Marinoff for tipping us off to this.
But Saturday, November 16, it was the trolley bus’s day to shine, in sunshiny Moscow, on the occasion of the technology’s 80th anniversary of service in the Russian capital. (That’s two years earlier than San Francisco’s first trolley coach line, the 33-line skirting Twin Peaks, established in 1935 by our namesake, Market Street Railway Co. Click here for a great video of the parade of Russian trolley coach history.
