Easy conversion of model no.30 from grew. magazine seriesDeAgostini "Car in service". Arrived in collection 10/08/2012 The purchased second copy of the GAZ-24-01 model of the early version decided to modify it to a version of the taxi of a later, second release, or, as they say, "the second series". The distinguishing features of these machines from the previous ones were: fanged bumpers, fog lights above the front bumpers and very often the classic version of the taxi was equipped with a small glowing orange shade on the roof - "comb". The main color was established lemon-yellow, which, however, could be either bright, saturated, or pale. Taxis were also available in other colors. So, in the mid-80s, in Leningrad, there were quite a lot of light beige taxis.
I decided to take as a basis the car of the fourth taxi fleet in Leningrad with the number "49-60". I don't know exactly what color it was real car, but I want to believe that in the traditional - lemon. According to site information http://lenobltrans.narod.ru/ taxi fleet # 4 was one of the largest in Leningrad. In 1969, there were at least 750 standard cars! He began to refine the model by painting the interior, imitating the cherry-red, leatherette upholstery of the fittings. The lower part of the torpedo is painted yellow. Silver plated rearview mirror. Installed fanged bumpers from a large-scale copy of the all-wheel drive GAZ-24-95. Painted over in the centers of the wheel caps. Indicated turn signals, sidelights, parking lights, pro-fog lights. An orange shade for the roof was made. The doors received relying vents, edged with metal tape. The model is decalized with "Volga" nameplates on the front fenders and slightly to the left of the right rear light... I, a little belatedly, awarded the driver of the prototype of this taxi with the title of Drummer of Communist Labor, which is eloquently reminded of the red flags on both sides of the Volga. I installed the numbers of the 4th taxi company in Leningrad. I decided to wait a little with the antenna on the rear bumper.

On the eve of the Olympic Games, it was decided to update the GAZ-2401 taxi cars. Lemon yellow became the standard color for them. An additional taxi sign was introduced in the form of an orange plafond on the roof.

Its presence made it possible not to draw checkers at all on parts of the machines. They made fangs on the bumper, changed the area for the license plate, removed reflectors from the rear panel of the body. Almost simultaneously, similar actions were taken with respect to the Volga of other modifications. In addition, fog lights were installed on standard GAZ-24. GAZ-24 successfully held out on the conveyor until 1985, when a radical modernization of the car was undertaken.

Leningrad taxi:

It was GAZ-24 cars during the time of developed socialism that were equipped with a single city taxi service. It was possible to order a taxi to the entrance by telephone 057 (later 24-00-00), but it was almost impossible to get through it.

And even if the dispatcher responded at the other end of the line, there was no reason to expect the taxi to arrive soon. I remember under New Year we waited for a taxi ... four hours!

The increased demand for a taxi was due to a rather "humane" price: 20 kopecks per landing, 20 kopecks per kilometer and a ruble per hour of waiting. Even with a low salary of 90-110 re. a person could easily afford several trips a month.

Since 1984 taxis in Leningrad have received a new license plate: black numbers on a white background. The letter series was LION. Since 1990 - ICE. According to some reports, the ICE series was previously issued to city buses during the 1980 Olympic Games. In 1990, the white one-line license plates ICE were issued to the state trucks and buses of Leningrad, and only new ones, and only hundreds from 00 to 19. After the introduction of Russian-style license plates, the unified system of letter series for city taxis ceased to be used.
By the early 1990s, there were more than 4 thousand taxis in Leningrad. In the 1990s, taxi rolling stock was largely privatized. To date, not all of the city's taxi companies have survived. Some simply ceased to exist, and some switched to operating route taxis.

GAZ-24-01 "Volga" 4th taxi fleet in Leningrad (early 80s)

The fourth taxi fleet in Leningrad

Taxi garage for 700 cars in Leningrad. Construction 1957-1960, architect. Khevelev E.M. with the participation of engineers Bregovsky M.I., Makarenko N.I., Ekman V.A.

The garage is a single multi-storey building of the central volume, square in plan, the same on all four sides. The adopted solution reduces the dimensions construction site, unifies structures as much as possible, gives a very compact and economical characteristic of the building and at the same time a simple but expressive architectural solution.

The ground floor, slightly expanded, includes a parking hall, a daily service area equipped with three mechanized production lines, inspection No. 1 with two mechanized production lines, inspection No. 2 and a maintenance area. There are also workshops and service rooms. The parking-hall of the first floor is a place for waiting for cars and a control transit point for communication with all production premises, which allows you to flexibly solve various combinations of production operations. Along the perimeter of the second floor there are all office and utility rooms, and interior it is reserved for parking. On the overlying floors there are parking lots with a two-row arrangement of cars. The vehicles are lifted and lowered along a central, isolated circular two-way ramp. The load-bearing elements of the building and interfloor floors are made of typical precast reinforced concrete structures with a 6x6 m grid of columns. For covering, floor beams (NII-200) with a span of 18 m were adopted. Prefabricated reinforced concrete panels with glass blocks are used as a filler for the frame. The walls of the corner parts of the building, where the staircases and passenger elevators are located, are brick, and all ventilation ducts are concentrated here. This frees the building from a large number ventilation pipes usually going out to garage roofs (in the photo above - a panorama of the construction of the 4th taxi park in Leningrad).

Cars were assembled in the small series workshop exclusively by hand using Tchaikovsky technologies. First, a layer of tin was applied to the body (tinned), and then manually covered with several layers of enamel and paintwork... To accommodate the enlarged radiator, the front spars had to be cut from below and an original sub-radiator beam was developed, on which the front suspension beam strut was also fixed. The weight of the "eight", of course, turned out to be more than the standard 4-cylinder engine, so the front side members again got it. The thickness of the metal was increased, and the spars were point-strengthened with additional braces and gussets.

The designers had to be smart about the layout. A bracket for a hydraulic vacuum brake booster was welded onto the left side member, and the brake circuit divider was also transferred there. An enlarged platform was welded onto the right side member for a more powerful battery... A plate of a two-channel switch of the ignition system was welded over the site. Such systems were installed on the BRDM: they are equipped with an emergency vibrator that allows you to get to the place with a faulty transistor switch or a damaged stator winding and is designed to start the machine in case of damage to the starting system with an electromagnetic pulse.

The GAZ-24-24 received a power steering, which was designed on the basis of a mechanism from the same Chaika, so the car, in comparison with the civilian modification, had better handling. She did not prowl straight on high speeds, and reinforced springs and stabilizer lateral stability the front helped to take turns more collected. Of course, driving a heavy car was still difficult - but no more than American muscle cars with their heavy cast-iron "eights" and soft suspension. According to factory data, the 24-24 reached a top speed of 170 km / h.

There was a modification of the machine with shielded electrical equipment, which received the index 24-25 and was intended for the installation of special communication equipment. The shielding helped to significantly reduce motor noise, which improved system performance. For this, the wires were covered with reinforced casings, and the starter also had its own protection.

The similarities with the usual "24th" were deliberately achieved so as not to stand out in the stream domestic cars... Usually such cars were painted in discreet black or gray colors. Nevertheless, the traffic cops began to pay attention to these cars: a trained eye immediately distinguished a low landing, a flat towing eye at the rear, special communication antennas of the Kavkaz complex and two exhaust pipes behind. The latter, as we already know, were welded into one common pipe, and the third pedal was left in the cabin. Of course, there is no clutch here: a three-stage “automatic” is aggregated with the motor - but on such a machine, in case of a failure of the amplifier, it was possible to brake with two feet at once. It was possible to distinguish such a catch-up from the inside only by the modified selector of the "machine" on the floor, slightly curved at the base, in contrast to the lever on the "mechanics".

After the start of the production of the GAZ-24-10, a special vehicle with the index 24-34 also appeared on its basis, which, in contrast to the 24-24, received a V8 engine with a closed crankcase ventilation system.

Service cars, just like trucks, are a familiar background in our life, dissolving into everyday life. You even get used to cars in bright special colors so much that you stop noticing them - but what, in fact, is remarkable about a traffic cop or a medical car? - they are at every turn, and almost all of them are completely Volga and Rafiki. But several years pass and the scenery changes smoothly - the usual "Rafiks" and "Volgas" are replaced by "GAZelles", "Zhiguli" and Fords, and the cars of the operational services that have served their time either disappear in the stream of civilian "private traders", having lost their official color and paraphernalia in the hands of the new owner, or - rolled into trash - rust in the backyard in anticipation of being cut for scrap. Police cars, ambulances, minibuses, buses and trucks, which shaped the appearance of cities thirty to forty years ago, are now difficult to see except in photographs: if trucks and buses are still found at exhibitions of automobile antiquities and in museums, then the cars of operational services rare guests even at exhibitions.

The Volga GAZ-24 model of the traffic cop, made by Chinese comrades by order of the St. Petersburg comrades, was announced last year, but only recently reached the shelves. The model is quite successful - the idea is good, the workmanship is quite decent, and the paint layer is, perhaps, a little thinner than on the Czech model. All the shortcomings of the model have long been known for other versions of the same form:, magazine versions - and.

Photo by A. Novikov

Officially, the model bears several names at once - she and GAZ VOLGA M-24 (on the bottom of the model), and GAZ 24 VOLGA Milicia (on the box), and GAZ-24 "VOLGA" Police 1973 (on a stand), there is also the article VVM 013 and a cardboard insert "Ivan Vasilievich changes his profession", confirming the model's belonging to the St. Petersburg "film series".

An illustration for those who like to say that "the Saratov models are not worse": GAZ-24-02 "Militia" from Saratov and GAZ-24 "Militia" from Macau. The Saratov model in the photo is obscenely new-made, but it differs from its counterparts from the 80s of the last century not fundamentally.

If the Chinese comrades have not yet completely mired in the huge circulation of magazine series, then it is quite possible to expect several variants of the police "Volga" - especially since the Czech version of the "chandelier", which was also used on soviet cars has already been made for, and the earlier version of the color scheme - with a circle on the trunk, can add variety.

There are tons of options for the creativity of Chinese modelers

Photo by A. Novikov

A question for attentiveness: why is the model shown in the photographs an absolute rarity, and its cost already now is at least twice the retail price of similar GAZ-24 "Police"?

GAZ-24 "Volga"

To all famous car GAZ-24 is one of the most popular car models of that time. It was practically inaccessible for the price of ordinary citizens. And it was mainly chiefs and directors, officials and deputies who moved on it.

The GAZ-24 car was mass-produced from 1969 to 1992 at the Gorky Automobile Plant. It was designed as a replacement for the GAZ-21 by that time, outdated in terms of design. Despite some shortcomings, the new body layout of the GAZ-24 was a big step forward in comparison with the GAZ-21.

In 1976, the production of the second series GAZ-24 was launched. Read about this modification in the corresponding article.

Like the GAZ-21, the GAZ-24 model immediately became a favorite means of transportation for the police authorities at all levels, since the GAZ-24 was associated with a luxury that was inaccessible to ordinary citizens. But besides this, a lot of cars came from the order of the traffic police, patrol services and operational groups. They were used by investigators and prosecutors. But at first all cars of this brand were mainly purchased for the needs of the police in large cities, in regional centers GAZ-24 cars began to arrive at the disposal of the police after a decade.

Technical characteristics of the car GAZ-24 "Volga": maximum speed - 145 km / h, acceleration time to 100 km / h - 23 s, fuel consumption - 13 liters per 100 km.

Photos of GAZ-24 militia of the USSR: