Comments on: Blogathon Vancouver 2008: "E" is for Electric Trolleybus

By: home made wind generators

home made wind generators — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 10:13:52 +0000

Nice blog . will visit again

By: Martin

Martin — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 19:45:57 +0000

@John Bollwitt, your friend’s guess is wrong, for the simple reason that a trolleybus doesn’t have a clutch. The electric motor is connected directly into the differential on the rear axle. Obviously there is gearing there to reduce the motor rotation speed down to the required speed of the wheels. The ratio is about 10 or 11 to 1. Apart from that, a trolleybus doesn’t have gears like a diesel bus. It can accelerate from 0 to about 45 mph without gear changes.

The jerking is more likely caused by slight flaws in the electronic controls. The electic motor has huge torque and it is controlled electronically to keep acceleration smoooooooth. But sometimes there is a glitch and it’s like a horse bolting. yee hah ^^

By: John Bollwitt

John Bollwitt — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 07:14:38 +0000

@fotoeins: I think the lights don’t flicker anymore because of batteries on the buses now. At least when they arms fall off the lines, they have some sort of backup power to get them to the side of the road and get things back on track.

Talking to Duane, the guy with some sort of engineering degree of a background, the lurching is probably due to a lack of maintaining the buses’ clutch. In my head, this makes complete sense, but I’d like to know TransLink’s reasoning behind this.

By: fotoeins

fotoeins — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 05:55:49 +0000

Thanks, John.

My earliest childhood memory in Vancouver was riding the BC Hydro Brill trolley along East Hastings between Chinatown and downtown. The lights would always flicker when the trolley passed through a junction or intersection of overhead wires.