Trolleybus History of Saint Petersburg

St. Petersburg is the birthplace of Russian trolleybus history. First trolley bus was built in March 31 of 1902. It was built by Petersburg's engineer P. A. Fresa. The first trolleybus way was from Red Square (now it's Alexander Nevsky Square) and Annunciation Square (now Square of Labor), its length was 5.8 km which is about 3.6 miles. This route was opened on October 21st, 1936. There were 4 cars in first trolleybuses. An interval in between trolleybuses was 15-16 minutes. An overall load was over 8 thousand passengers a day. The first trolley was made at a factory of Vagonoremontny (Varz-1). Later Leningrad was getting these machines from Yaroslavl plant (YATB-1-2-4), they had a wooden body and these trolleys were used until 1959. To support the TV was adapted depot number 3 tram park named Smirnov. By 1940 trolleybuses had transported over 41 million passengers. By 1941 in Leningrad there were 5 trolley routes the length of which was 49.1 kilometers and there were 130 machines.

Trolley-buses were stopped running when Leningrad was in a blockade in December 8, 1941 due to the cessation of the supply of electricity. In February of 1944 a transportation began to work again. In 1944 the line had only 16 machines, but in 1947 the route network had reached its pre-war level, while the volume of annual traffic got to 80 million. In 1946 were built 4 new-generation trolley-buses. They had metal body and a large capacity of 65 people. At the end of 1982 a first trolleybus came out of the plant which could carry up to 250 passengers. By 1990 the length of a single route was about 700 km. St. Petersburg had about 1.3 thousand units. In 1990 it carried about 550 million passengers a year.