Gent 13102007 Trolleybus 7419

Gent, October 13th 2007

Between March 1989 and July 2009, the city of Gent in Belgium had a single Trolleybus service (line #30/31, later line #3), alongside its regular busses and electric trams.  Originally, this line was inaugurated in 1989 as a 'demonstrator' for the Van Hool/ACEC-built AG280T trolleybusses, replacing bus service #30/31

Originally exploited by the MIVG (Intercommunal Transport Company of Gent), the 20 AG280T trolleybusses served for most of their lives in the colours of De Lijn, although four of them were temporally loaned to the city of Arnhem in the Netherlands, which also had (and still has) a trolleybus system.  Eventually, their advanced age and the fact part of their route would be interrupted for a prolonged time due to works led to the withdrawal of the trolleybus service.  They were administratively replaced by hybrid busses (currently dieselbusses), but plans have been made to replace the bus service with a tram service sometime in the near future.

While three of the twenty AG280T's were prematurely withdrawn from service, and two were preserved, the balance of fifteen busses was sold to the city of Plovdiv in Bulgaria.  Bus 7419 was one of the latter lot.

Gent was not the only Belgian city to have trolleybusses - Antwerp (1929-1964), Brussels (1939-1964) and Liège (1930-1971) preceded it.



However, Gent previously also had an experimental Gyrobus service (1956-1959), one of only three in the world!