My professional life with the transport company: Vladimír Pejřil, transport technical director

I joined the company at a time when the legendary „round“ trolleybuses TR9 were still running here and there were a number of ŠM11 city buses in the yard. „It is funny that I passed my driving licence for group D on a Škoda 706 RTO bus after submitting the compulsory driving experience on a lorry, i.e. on a vehicle that today carries, for example, wedding guests as an attraction,“ he recalls a number of other buses and trolleybuses that were gradually bought for the company. „For example, we bought the first articulated Karosa in the country as an exhibition exhibit at the Brno Engineering Fair.

The absolute turning point came in 1996, when low-floor buses began to be purchased and the Hradec Králové transport company was the first to renew its fleet with them, even though they were almost twice as expensive as a classic public transport bus of that time. We decided that as part of the mandatory renewal we would overhaul some of the vehicles and use the money saved to buy the first six low-floor solo cars, then still from Renault. Ten years ago, we were again one of the first in the country to introduce electric buses. Now hybrid cars are the latest novelty,“ he recalls the rapid development of the fleet, adding that when the company made similar major decisions, everything was always carefully examined and prepared, which is probably why we have neither LPG nor CNG cars in the transport company. Another fundamental change in the fleet occurred after 1989 in trolleybus transport, when the production of trolleybuses in Ostrov nad Ohří ended. The market then brought a completely new thing, namely that trolleybus equipment could be put into any bus body. That is why the company now runs SOR cars.

He also came into the business at a time when computers were rare and unheard of. One of the first tasks that Vladimír Pejřil was given at his post in the late 1980s was to transfer the services of the drivers to a computer together with the computer centre of the transport company. As it gradually turned out, the use of computer technology brought fundamental changes to the life of the company. „I also came, for example, in the era of only paper tickets, the cars were marked with yellow signs with the names of the lines, these were changed by the driver during the service at the final stops, but to this day I remember most that the said signs were lost, we were constantly looking for a way to prevent the situation that the vehicle would leave without the necessary number and execution of the said signs, we always wished that the signs would be replaced by electronics, this has indeed happened over the years and the whole information system not only in the cars has undergone a huge transformation, but none of us could imagine that even the „dream“ electronics has its shortcomings.

Article continues in magazine Dopravák