Starting to solve the issue of electric transport, the Vladikavkaz authorities were faced with the need for billions of dollars of capital investment in the city’s infrastructure, without which the renewal of the tram fleet becomes irrelevant. But, unfortunately, there is no such money in the city treasury. They are looking for a way out of the situation.
Traveling by tram in the capital of North Ossetia costs only 13 rubles, perhaps the cheapest in all of southern Russia. During the year, trams carry about five million passengers, while the population of Vladikavkaz is 600 thousand. However, the problems that Vladikavkaz’s electric transport has faced in recent years have put it on the brink of disaster. Since the year 2000, the municipality has been constantly under-financing the tram station and as a result, in 2016, MUE Vladelectrotrans ran up millions of debts and went bankrupt. At that time, the city authorities and the government of the republic even considered the option of completely removing the tram and dismantling the tracks, so bad was the situation.
The transport is equipped with a large number of electronic components. For example, the tram will not work if the doors are not closed.
If it had not been for the Ossetian capital, this would have turned into a transport collapse. In addition, the Vladikavkaz tram is the oldest in the North Caucasus after the Pyatigorsk tram and has historical value – it entered the first route in 1904.
But they managed to find another solution: all the assets of Vladelectrotrans were transferred to the new company MUE Vladtramvay, and electric transport in the city was preserved. However, the condition of the carriages themselves was simply catastrophic. Suffice it to say that huge holes were opened in the floor of some trams. According to local residents, there were cases when, due to the deterioration of carriages and rails, trams overturned along with people during the movement. Fortunately, there were no victims. As one of the employees of the tram depot told the “RG” correspondent, the equipment that went into the line was built in 1985 and first “worked” in Germany for 15 years before it was bought and put into operation already in Vladikavkaz. Cars were repeatedly repaired, but this situation did not fundamentally change.
And this year, as a result of the efforts of the head of the republic, Sergei Menyailo, and the mayor of Vladikavkaz, Vyacheslav Mildzikhov, new trams were purchased with funds allocated from the federal budget. When they entered the ranks, they made the same impression on local residents as if spaceships began to cross the streets of the city. This update has been long awaited.
Trams came to Vladikavkaz in a semi-disassembled and assembled form, they were installed on the spot. All this work was carried out at the technical inspection point (PTO) of the municipal electric transport. Its quality was ensured by specialists from the Uraltransmash plant, who came to the North Caucasus on a business trip from Yekaterinburg.
– Vladikavkaz bought a car model 71-412, not the newest, but very reliable, well-proven, – says the head of the service department of “Uraltransmash” Vladimir Zheltonogov. – The cost of one such car is 61 million rubles. The transport is equipped with a large amount of electronics. For example, the car will not move if the doors are not closed. But the most important thing here, of course, is the motor bogies on which the wheel sets are installed. The complexity of this mechanism, for example, is evidenced by the fact that each of these cars has 22 lubrication points. Two bogies are required for each wagon.
But most of all, the specialists of the Yekaterinburg plant are concerned not with the tuning of the cars they brought, but with the condition of the railway tracks and the contact networks of the tram lines in Vladikavkaz. It turned out that in the Ossetian capital they are so worn out that they can hardly stand new, heavier and faster equipment.
The total length of the railway, on which trams run in Vladikavkaz, is 59.3 kilometers. In many sections, the rails have not been changed for 30 years or more, they have worn out and rusted, they began to break and collapse. According to the Department of Transport and Road Construction of the Vladikavkaz administration, 90 percent of the city’s tram lines require renovation.
It got to the point that the specialists of the service department of “Uraltransmash” on some sections of the railway simply refused to release new running cars until the faults were eliminated. We must pay tribute, the rails, indeed, where necessary, were quickly repaired, and the trams left. But the problem of the general state of the city’s electric transport infrastructure remained unresolved.
Poor road quality can cause expensive wagons to fail quickly.
“The equipment found in these cars is very complex and requires fine tuning,” says Denis Bratsev, an electrician at Uraltransmash. – Here it will not work to simply “hit with a sledgehammer” if something breaks, and everything will be fixed. The technique is completely different, new generation. And very sensitive to the condition of the road.
According to experts, the low quality of the railway will cause the suspension and engine bogies to break very quickly in new (and very expensive) wagons. The effect is almost the same as if a “parquet” car instead of a high-speed highway moved along a dirt road, where at every step there are holes and potholes. The technical side of the problem is not visible to a simple layman, but if nothing is changed, the new trams will be idle for repairs, and a lot of money will be spent on their repair, say analysts interviewed by the RG correspondent.
At the same time, it is quite obvious that the replacement of the rails and the network of contacts throughout the city is a multimillion-dollar investment, for which the city and republic treasury clearly does not have enough funds. And the entire electric transport infrastructure of the city needs to be updated. For example, having visited the technical inspection point, you can be sure that the buildings of the tram depot and the technical service station require major repairs and the replacement of almost all the equipment in them. And next to the new Uraltransmash trams, dilapidated buildings look especially bad.
For the sake of fairness, it must be said that the Vladikavkaz authorities have already begun to replace the network of tram contacts. But this is something that can be done quickly, and without financial investments as large as those needed to improve, for example, a railway.
– The network of contacts in the city is very deteriorated, – admitted Konstantin Kargiev, head of the energy management service of the Municipal Unitary Enterprise “Vladtramvay”. – There is a lot of work, but by the end of summer we want to change about 1500 meters. At the same time, today in Vladikavkaz, 22 kilometers of contact cable require replacement, its wear is 50-80 percent.
Let’s hope that the modernization of the rest of the electric transport infrastructure will be the next step of the Vladikavkaz authorities, and there will be funds for this in the federal budget. Indeed, today the tram, as the most accessible public transport, has remained only in two cities of the North Caucasian Federal District – Vladikavkaz and Pyatigorsk.
Meanwhile
Having replaced 28 carriages, the Vladikavkaz authorities have renewed the city’s tram fleet by only 75 percent. 11 cars built in 1985 are still on the roads.
