construction site of the Basel railways
YouTube name: Oscar am Freitag-TV.
Language: German.
Date: October 2018.
City: Gotha (Germany).
The video shows
Thüringerwaldbahn und Straßenbahn Gotha
Operational
Description
Gotha (red, March 17). It was in October 2018: A team from "Oscar am Freitag" TV was standing in the depot of the Thüringer Waldbahn und Straßenbahn Gotha GmbH (TWSB). Their interest was piqued by the information that the company had bought six trams.
In itself, that is newsworthy. But when we are talking about almost 40-year-old vehicles, each with a good 1 million km on the clock and coming from Basel (Switzerland), then that really arouses journalistic curiosity (video from 2018: https://youtu.be/dCGUeD7kCbM).
Road vehicles in Germany from these years of manufacture would receive an H license plate here and would roll through the country with tax benefits as vintage vehicles. However, the Swiss sextet from the Baselland Transport AG (BLT) inventory was not intended to enrich the TWSB's historic fleet. Rather, the plan was to give it a fountain of youth. Also to significantly increase the proportion of trams with low-floor technology.
But since new vehicles were only available for unit prices starting at 1 million euros, the TWSB had relied on the oldies - not least because the Free State of Thuringia does not support new purchases, but does support modernizations such as those planned in Gotha.
By 2019 at the latest, on the 100th anniversary of the Thuringian Forest Railway, at least one first tram between Gotha and Bad Tabarz should start regular service. That was the optimistic forecast.
March 2021. Four of the Swiss trams are in the depot in Gotha-West as they arrived in Gotha in mid-2018. At least the six chassis of another were dismantled for repair; since then it has been resting on temporary bogies in one of the fleet halls.
Only the tram with the number "222" has a fresh coat of paint, typical for the TWSB, after more than 30 months. The interior of the 26 m long articulated tram of the type Be 4/8 - like its five sisters, built at the end of the 1970s by Schindler Waggon AG in Pratteln - is still a construction site.
Why this is the case, why the Swiss tram first had to become a German "railway" so that it could then be converted back into a tram approved for use in this country, but which is still not operational - this almost never-ending story of the "Basler Bahnen construction site" is told openly and in detail by Karl-Heinz Koch, the managing director of the Thüringer Waldbahn und Straßenbahn Gotha GmbH (TWSB).
