We have taken you to the worlds biggest Trolleybus line in the capital of Belarus. It was the beginning of our new focus on trolleybus networks around the world.
I mentioned early in that article about Landskrona and the worlds shortest trolleybus line 3 line which makes me wonder about what the politicians in that town are thinking? Bergen in Norway also only got 1 trolleybus line but they have built ‘bybanen’ light rail system. Also here, the expansions of the trolleybus line take time.
Many cities in the Nordic countries had trolleybuses. Just look at Drammen in Norway which had them from 1909 until 1968! Only Bergen and Landskrona is the Nordic cities that got them.
I wanted to take a deeper look into what Wikipedia says its one of the world’s smallest systems.
1 Trolleybus line in Landskrona
The population in Landskrona is a bit more than 30.000! It is a small town and so the politicians decided to build a single trolleybus route that connects the railway station with the city center and the wharf area. But that’s it seems.
I bet that this investment never will be positive if they don’t invest in a bigger network. Just look at the map above. All of the blue lines are normal bus lines in the town. Many of them could have been converted. Arnhem in The Netherlands got 6 lines at the time of writing this article and Tychy in Poland got 5 lines.
The very short trolleybus bus route opened in 2003 and initially employed just three trolleybuses at the start of its life. This made it one of the world’s smallest systems. It took another 10 years to get 2 more buses so since September 2013 the town got in total 5 trolleybuses.
I think personally that this trolleybus project would have gone much better if they actually wanted it to reach the entire town area. The line has a length of 3km (one tour 6km) and has only 160 poles because of the unilateral connection used in most cases for both directions (4 cables for 2 catenaries).
Small town with people that wants more trolleybuses
Since 2003 the town had 3 trolleybuses. But because of the increasing number of passengers a fourth bus was introduced in 2010 and a fifth in 2013.
The number of passengers nearly doubled between 2003 and 2009 and so I ask these politicians about why nothing more is done to this remarkable public transportation system. The usage went from 320.000 passengers in 2003 to about 600.000 in 2009. I have been to Landskrona many times and the town got tons of housing apartments outside of the city center which would benefit from having trolleybus connections there.
Trolleybuses is great to be built for towns that don’t want much disturbance. The benefits of trolleybuses is that they can run like any other buses, but they run on electricity. There are new electric busses in Oslo but they all uses batteries that must be charged and they cant coup with the winter temperatures as much. Trolleybuses do cope with cold a lot better than battery buses and they even got internal combustion engines.
The trolleybuses also got no water to freeze. So this is a good reason for why so many cities in eastern Europe where winters can be chilly loves the trolleybuses so much.
Trolleybuses are very nice alternatives to trams or light rail systems
Just look at all of the trolleybus towns that run tons of trolleybus routes. Minsk, Arnhem, and Tychy is just a few examples. Almost the entire eastern part of Europe and even San Francisco in the USA got them running successfully. Landskrona should do something about this.
Its nice to see Landskrona going alternative with their trolleybus solution. But the town should have built it everywhere. So, what are these politicians waiting for?
