Prague will experience the last ride on the T6A5 tram
T6A5 trams will run from 08:00 to 18:00 at 15-minute intervals on line 4 from Smíchovské nádraží to Čechovo náměstí. At 18:15 all six trams leave from Smíchovské nádraží on the way through Prague. They will travel along the route Anděl, Újezd, Malostranská and through Chotkovy sady to Špejchar, where people will be able to take pictures. At 19:00 they set out on their last ride to their home depots. After today, the company will keep two T6A5 trams, which will be used on tourist retrolinks.
When the DPP took over the first of a total of 150 T6A5s in the mid-1990s, this allows for significant improvements for passengers. They saw a more modern interior, including upholstered seats (later the seating capacity must be maintained by a third, when the car on the right side began to supply two seats next to each other) or more powerful ventilation. The method of heating has also changed, instead of heated seats as the T3 had, the vents in the wall of the car near the floor were solved.
The most visible change was the outer shape, instead of the round shapes of the T3 type came square lines. The design was due to the era of origin. Moreover, at a time when transport companies around the world were introducing low-floor models en masse, passengers had to take several steps up the T6A5. The first passengers were transported in Prague in November 1995.
Even before Prague, the T6A5 trams appeared in Bratislava (1991) and Košice (1992), the first Czech transport company to take over the type, then the Ostrava one in 1994. The fifth city to buy “the six” as new was Brno. In the end, a large part of the cars discarded by the DPP went to the Moravian metropolis. On the recommendation of 2019, 30 T6A5s were in operation in the streets of Prague.
Unlike the “three” – but also the double-sided articulated KT8, where the middle part was replaced by a low-floor – the Prague T6A5 cars were never reconstructed. That is why their service in the capital was coming to an end. DPP could allow their decommissioning thanks to the fact that it reaches both the supply of reconstructed T3 (over 380 pieces) and the modern high-capacity low-floor type 15T (the company bought 250 of them). It also has almost fifty modernized KT8 and over 50 low-floor 14T.