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Comment by m4rtink | Hacker News Reader

That started showing up maybe ~5 years ago ?

Googling a bit I found this article about the first series produced parcial trolley busses (eq. battery equiped) being delivered in 2018: https://www.bmhd.cz/aktuality/aktualita.php?1481

Since then it certainly expanded a lot & there are now regular lines that have the trolleybus go part of the line under its own power, like the recently introduced line to Soběšice: https://brnensky.denik.cz/zpravy_region/brno-mhd-prvni-linka...

Thanks to this you can go watch them stow/deploy their collectors at the Královo Pole nádraží stop at about any time during the day. :)

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Do the poles fall off the wires a lot? Our trolley buses in Seattle have a bit of a problem with that. According to the folks I know in San Francisco, theirs do too. They're great otherwise though. Seattle's newer trolley buses can operate off the wire for about 3 miles/5 kilometers (on a LiFePO4 battery) which helps a bit.

I have seen it happen a few times, but it does not seem to happen very often. I don't think I ever saw it happen when riding a trolley bus - usually I saw a stopped trolleybus with the driver stepping out & reatacching the collector poles before driving away. Took a couple minutes at most.

It was usually in some tricky spots - trolley wires crossing streetcar wire on Konečného náměstí (yeah, we have both :) ) or on the top of the rather steep slope of the Kotlářská street next to the Natural sciences faculty of the Masaryk university.

I guess the new trolley busses with batteries and poles thatr can be stowed automatically might be even better for this - no need to fix the poles immediately, but wait for a regular stop or even the line terminus & just use the battery.

Also once when touring one of the trolleybus depos (the small one in Husovice) the local maintenance chief mentioned that the one roundabout wired for trolley buses (yes, that exists) is a pain to maintain & maybe they could scrap it in the future, with the busses crossing it on batteries instead. :)

Oof yeah I can see how a roundabout would cause a headache. I really enjoy the trolleybuses; there are some plans in place to expand the system, but not enough IMO.

We also have both streetcars and trolleybuses, and some strange junctions like the one at 5th and Jackson: https://maps.app.goo.gl/4TuLXmRLY5yK6HGJ6

There are some nice blog posts from a Seattle bus driver that go over some of the nerdy details of our system: https://www.nathanvass.com/blog/i-dont-know-what-a-trolley-i... https://www.nathanvass.com/blog/i-dont-know-what-a-trolley-i...

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