Trams in Moscow

The tram Moscow (Russian Московский трамвай / Moskovsky Tramwai ) is the tram in the Russian capital Moscow. It has a track gauge of 1,524 mm and a voltage of 550 V DC. On two separate nets with a total length of 181.2 kilometers ( January 2013) operate a total of 41 lines, mainly to meet the feeder functions for the Metro. Operators tram Moscow are the urban transport companies Mosgortrans.

History

The power goes back to the first horse-drawn tram, which was built by the Belgian company Compagnie générale des tramways de Moscou et de Russie and opened on 22 June 1872. The first steam tramway wrong on July 29, 1886, the first electric tram on April 6, 1899. Since, however, the electric railway faced skeptical, let the opening of the second route to the August 3, 1903 in coming. The railways were taken over in 1911 by the city, which had established in 1904 its own streetcar company. By 1912, then all the lines were electrified by a steam tram line.

From 1935, the railway competition received by the new metro; number of routes (especially in the city center ) have been set. In the 1950s and 1960s, there were plans to completely replace the tram by trolleybuses. Reasons for this were because Nikita Khrushchev was impressed by this transport system. 1983 plans were presented, which provided for an extension of the existing routes to nearly 200 kilometers. Except for the new line to Strogino in the northwest of the city, however none of the lines has been realized.

Operation

The web has some special features. Thus, there are two separate sub-networks. The larger covers about three-quarters of routes and is located mainly in the south and east of the city. The smaller is located in the northwest. There is no connection between the subnets, even missing a working link.

Another special feature of transport in Moscow is that there is no structured line numbering. So it may happen that a certain line number exists three times, when the tram, trolleybus and the omnibus. Furthermore, there's no timetable as the transport companies assume that this due to the strong individual traffic anyway can not be met and therefore superfluous.