I Came Back to Chișinău and the Old Trolleybuses Had Disappeared

Today I noticed one of those changes that is probably much more obvious when you have been away for a while.

After a long period outside Moldova, I was back in Chișinău looking at the traffic and suddenly realised that something familiar was missing. The old trolleybuses had disappeared. I remembered the ageing vehicles that still carried something of the visual character of the Soviet period: functional, unmistakably old and very difficult to confuse with twenty-first-century public transport. Now I was looking around and seeing modern trolleybuses instead.

I kept watching them as we drove through the city, half expecting one of the old ones to appear eventually. It did not. Modern vehicle after modern vehicle passed us, and the contrast with what I remembered was remarkable. It felt as though somebody had quietly replaced an entire generation of public transport while I was away.

As first impressions go, it was a very good one.

First, what exactly is a trolleybus?

For anyone who grew up somewhere without them, a trolleybus requires a little explanation. Imagine an ordinary city bus, remove the diesel engine as its principal source of propulsion, give it an electric motor, and connect it to overhead electrical wires. Instead of running on steel rails like a tram, it runs on normal rubber tyres and shares the road with cars, buses and everything else.

Electricity reaches the vehicle through two long poles mounted on its roof. I have always thought of them as electrical masts, although the more accurate term is trolley poles. They maintain contact with the pair of overhead wires while the vehicle moves through the city.

In simplistic terms, it is almost as though somebody looked at an electric tram and said: “The electricity is a good idea. The rails are inconvenient. Let's put tyres on it.”

And thus, for the purposes of this non-engineering explanation, we have the trolleybus.

A trolleybus is essentially an electrically powered city bus that takes its energy from overhead wires but runs on ordinary roads rather than rails. The result combines some of the advantages of a tram with much more flexibility in the road itself.

There are obvious advantages. At the point of use there is no diesel exhaust coming from the vehicle, which is particularly valuable in a dense city centre. Electric motors are also well suited to the constant stopping and starting of urban transport. Chișinău already has an extensive overhead electrical network, so the basic infrastructure exists across much of the city.

There is, however, one characteristic of traditional trolleybuses that anybody who has spent enough time in Chișinău will eventually encounter.

Sometimes the poles come off the wires.

When the electricity becomes temporarily detached

There is something simultaneously amusing and infuriating about watching this happen. The trolleybus is proceeding normally through traffic, then something goes wrong at the overhead connection and it stops. The driver gets out, walks around the vehicle and has to restore the trolley poles to the overhead wires.

Mechanically, it is not usually a catastrophe. From the perspective of everybody sitting in cars behind a stationary trolleybus on an already congested Chișinău street, however, it can be a significant nuisance. The trolleybus is not a particularly small object, and there is rarely an abundance of spare road space around it.

This is also an area where the technology has been evolving. Chișinău has trolleybuses with autonomous propulsion that can travel away from the overhead network for part of their route. That allows services to extend into areas without trolley wires and reduces some of the traditional operational limitations of the system. The basic trolleybus concept may be old, but it is not necessarily obsolete.

In fact, once I started checking what had happened while I was away, I realised that the change I had noticed was considerably more systematic than simply buying a few attractive new vehicles.

They really have been replacing them

Chișinău has been carrying out a substantial modernisation of its municipal transport fleet. According to City Hall, 183 new and previously operated trolleybuses were acquired between 2020 and 2025 as part of the programme to modernise the fleet of Regia Transport Electric Chișinău, the municipal electric transport operator.

There is an interesting local element to the programme as well. Of those 183 trolleybuses, the municipality says that 85 were assembled directly in the RTEC workshops in Chișinău. The fleet includes conventional vehicles, articulated trolleybuses and vehicles capable of autonomous operation away from the overhead electrical network. Other vehicles were acquired from European operators and include models from manufacturers such as Škoda, Van Hool and Solaris.

So when I say that everything suddenly looked new, “new” needs to be understood in the everyday rather than the accounting sense. Not every vehicle I am seeing necessarily left a factory yesterday. Some of the modernisation involved good-quality used European vehicles, while others were assembled locally. What matters from the passenger's point of view is that the obviously ageing generation of public transport I remembered has been progressively displaced by vehicles that belong much more convincingly in a modern European capital.

The differences are not merely cosmetic. The municipality lists low floors, accessibility ramps, air conditioning, passenger-information systems, surveillance cameras and USB charging among the equipment introduced with the modern fleet. These are fairly ordinary expectations in modern public transport, which is precisely the point. Chișinău is increasingly making them ordinary too.

The impressive part is not that Chișinău bought a few showcase vehicles. It is the scale of the renewal. When I came back after being away, the old trolleybuses I remembered no longer seemed to be part of everyday traffic.

City Hall puts its investment in the 2020–2025 trolleybus acquisitions at around 280 million Moldovan lei. The work has also included the less visible infrastructure behind the vehicles: depots, workshops and maintenance of the overhead contact network. Public transport modernisation is therefore not simply a matter of parking shiny buses in front of the camera and declaring victory. The system behind them has to work as well.

The strange advantage of going away

There is an interesting psychological effect when you leave somewhere and return later. People who experience a city every day see changes gradually. One old trolleybus disappears, another vehicle arrives, a route changes, some infrastructure is repaired, and each individual step is relatively unremarkable. Because the transformation happens continuously, it can be difficult to appreciate the cumulative result.

Going away gives you a before-and-after comparison.

My mental photograph of Chișinău's public transport had effectively been frozen. When I returned, reality had moved on without updating the picture in my head. That is why the change struck me so strongly today. I was comparing the city in front of me not with yesterday's Chișinău, but with the Chișinău I remembered.

And the difference was substantial.

This does not mean that every problem with public transport has magically disappeared. Modern vehicles still have to operate in a city with considerable traffic congestion. The overhead network still requires maintenance. Routes, frequencies, accessibility, ticketing and integration all matter. Replacing rolling stock is an important part of modernising public transport, but it is not the entire job.

Still, replacing the old vehicles is a very visible start.

Moldova towards Europe

I inevitably connect changes like this with Moldova's broader European direction. I do not mean that buying a trolleybus somehow earns points in an EU accession checklist. Chișinău City Hall is responsible for municipal transport, while accession to the European Union is a national political, economic and legal process. They should not be confused.

But there is another sense in which the connection feels real to me. European integration is not meaningful only when politicians are sitting around a negotiating table in Brussels. For the person living here, the interesting question is whether Moldova is gradually becoming cleaner, better organised, more accessible, more prosperous and more comfortable to live in. Modern public transport is one small and very visible part of that.

The government's stated ambition is to prepare Moldova for EU membership by 2030. Whether the political process will actually deliver membership on that timetable depends on Moldova, the European Union and events that nobody can predict with certainty. I therefore treat 2030 as an objective rather than a promised accession date.

Moldova joining the European Union is a political process measured in negotiating chapters, reforms and institutions. Living in Moldova, however, I also measure progress in much simpler things: roads, services, infrastructure and, today, trolleybuses.

I like what I am seeing.

There is still a great deal to do in Moldova, and I have never had difficulty identifying things that irritate me here. Anyone reading this blog for long enough will certainly know that. But criticism is only useful if I am equally willing to recognise improvement when it happens.

Today I came back to Chișinău and discovered that an entire category of old public transport that I associated with the city's Soviet inheritance seemed to have disappeared from the streets.

In its place were modern electric trolleybuses quietly moving underneath the same extraordinary web of overhead wires.

Same basic idea. Much better implementation.

Moldova towards the EU in 2030, baby.

I am watching.

AI Assistance Disclosure: This article is based on my own observations, memories and impressions after returning to Chișinău following a period away from Moldova. Artificial intelligence tools were subsequently used as editorial and research assistants to improve grammar and structure, verify the scale and nature of Chișinău's trolleybus fleet modernisation, clarify some technical terminology and check the context of Moldova's European integration objectives.

Factual information about the trolleybus modernisation programme was checked against material published by Chișinău City Hall and Regia Transport Electric Chișinău. The distinction between what I personally observed on the streets and what can be established from official fleet information has been preserved. Moldova's 2030 European Union objective is presented as a political goal rather than a guaranteed accession date. The personal observations, opinions, humour and conclusions remain my own.