[Eugen1985]

This MTB - 82, the first Museum trolleybus in Chisinau preserved in working condition. This is one of the six trolleybuses which in 1949 - 1950 opened the first trolleybus route in Chisinau. The pictures are from 2017 and I have also pictures of this trolleybus from 2023. This trolleybus is preserved in the first trolleybus depot.

MTB-82 is a Soviet high-floor trolley bus of medium capacity for intraurban passenger transportation, serially produced from 1946 to 1961. The total number of produced MTB-82 exceeds five thousand trolley buses. This allowed MTB-82 to occupy a dominant position among the models of trolley buses that operated in the USSR in the 1950s. The majority of trolley buses of this type were decommissioned in the late 1960s - early 1970s. The last MTB-82 was suspended from work with passengers at the end of 1983 in Kutaisi. Several MTB-82 are preserved in various soviet cities. Initially, the MTB-82 was launched at the plant No. 82 of the People's Commissariat of the USSR Aircraft Industry in Tushino outside Moscow (currently the Tushino Machine-Building Plant). In 1951, production was moved to the Uritsky plant in the city of Engels, Saratov region (currently CJSC "Trolza").
MTB-82 was centrally supplied to the overwhelming majority of those who worked in 1946-1960. Trolleybus companies of the USSR. Since at that time there were no other domestic manufacturers of trolleybuses, except Plant No. 82 and since 1951 ZiU, until the withdrawal from production, MTB-82 was an uncontested option. In the already existing by 1946 trolleybus companies, MTB-82 worked together with the pre-war YTB vehicles, and in the newly created until 1960 they were the pioneers of the movement and occupied a monopoly position - there were simply no other brands of rolling stock. Even after the mass release of ZiU-5 began, the share of MTB-82 remained significant for a long time. MTB-82 worked in Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, Minsk, Gorky, Krasnoyarsk, Chisinau, Baku, Kuibyshev, Kharkov, Voronezh and many other cities of the USSR. After the end of the mass production of MTB-82, they worked for a long time on urban routes and were often written off not because of technical condition (it more than allowed for further operation), but as morally obsolete machines. Due to the supply of more numerous ZiU-5, and later ZiU-9, there was no point in trying to keep the old cars. Therefore, mainly by 1970-1975. MTB-82 disappeared from the streets of USSR cities, and a few remaining trolleybuses of this brand became official or museum cars. In some trolleybus companies of Georgia MTB-82 worked until the beginning of the 1980s, there were some cases in other trolleybus systems when MTB-82 "were delayed at work". For example, in Gorky (1947-1971), extremely narrow and small depot rooms No. 1 in the Upper Part of the city could not serve the ZiU-5 overall, so until 1971 it operated only with the MTB-82, while in the Zarechnoye ZiU-5 they completely superseded. MTB-82 also worked in several foreign countries of the socialist bloc: Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia.