Electric tram-omnibus

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The electric tram-omnibus from Siemens & Halske, taken here with the pair of guide wheels lowered in October 1898 on the eastern outskirts of Berlin

The electric tram-omnibus , also known as the electric street-omnibus or - to distinguish it from the trackless railway - was an experimental vehicle by Siemens & Halske presented in Berlin in 1898 .

In the prototype , it was a two-way vehicle in facility construction , which is a mixture between an electric tram - rail cars and a bus , or more precisely an early battery bus , showed. For the experiment, the company equipped a former horse bus from Allgemeine Berliner Omnibus AG (ABOAG) with a traction battery , a lyre pantograph and a lowerable guide and contact wheel set based on the so-called perambulator system . The car ran on the track with the idlers lowered and the pantograph attached to charge the energy storage device. The guide wheel set was used for guidance in the track and also for traction current return . Then he branched off from the tram route with the idler set raised and the pantograph removed, the batteries having a range of six kilometers.

The four electric motors , each with 5.5 kilowatts of power at 500 volts DC and 1000 revolutions per minute, powered all four wheels in independent suspension . In addition to a block brake , the tram-omnibus also had a short-circuit brake , which was far from common in the trams of the time and also acted on all four wheels. The ball-bearing turntable on the front axle could be turned until the wheels were across. This enabled the vehicle to turn around in narrow streets.

During a test drive on April 21, 1899, on the 21-kilometer route from Treptower Krugallee via Schlesisches Tor and Baumschulenweg to the Vienna Bridge , the car reached a top speed of 30 km / h.

In September 1899, the manufacturer presented the principle to a wider audience at the First International Motor Vehicle Exhibition , which took place on site, but it never got beyond test drives in the Berlin area. It was originally intended for the direct connection of small villa colonies with large cities, as well as for long, heavily traveled streets and splendid avenues on which track construction was out of the question.

In 1900 Siemens & Halske finally stopped the unsuccessful project. Regardless of this, the company also offered the same car in the catalog as a pure trackless railway, i.e. without a pair of idlers and a battery, but with two pantographs for operation under two-pole overhead lines . However, this variant was not implemented, but very similar vehicles then ran on the Saxon Bielathalbahn from 1901 .

literature

  • Mattis Schindler: Trolleybuses in Germany . Volume 1: Berlin - Brandenburg - Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Schleswig-Holstein - Hamburg - Bremen - Lower Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt - Thuringia - Saxony, former German eastern territories. Ed .: Ludger Kenning. Kenning, Nordhorn 2009, ISBN 978-3-933613-34-9 .