BDŽ passenger cars

Overview of normal gauge passenger cars supplied to BDŽ from the 1960s to the present.

At the beginning of the 1960s, the European railway companies united in the organizations UIC and OSJD dealt with the standardization of passenger cars for international traffic. While the UIC defined uniform cars of the UIC-X and UIC-Y types, the OSJD organization, in which the railways of the Eastern Bloc were united, defined slightly different types OSJD-A and OSJD-B.

Production of OSJD-B cars began in the GDR at the beginning of the 1960s, and one of the first foreign customers was the Bulgarian State Railways BDŽ, which received two smaller series of cars of this type in 1962 and 1963. Although car production in the GDR soon shifted to the UIC-Y type, in Bulgaria the OSJD-B type was further developed at domestic Andrey Zhdanov wagon factory in Dryanovo. By the end of the 1970s, more than 1000 cars of this type were produced in various series for BDŽ, which thus became the basis of the BDŽ fleet, and BDŽ thus became the largest operator of cars of this type. In the 1980s, cars of the unique B-84 type, characterized by its sloping sidewalls, were produced in the Dryanovo wagon factory. They were developed especially for BDŽ and were not in use anywhere outside Bulgaria. UIC-Y and later UIC-Z2 type cars were delivered from wagon factories in the GDR only in relatively small numbers and were mainly intended for international trains.

In the late 1980s, the Bulgarian economy fell into a serious crisis, which was reflected in the economic possibilities of the BDŽ state railways. Since the 1990s, the renewal of BDŽ's vehicle fleet has been solved, with one small exception, exclusively by buying used cars from abroad. First, at the beginning of the 1990s, a small number of second-hand cars were bought from the French railways SNCF, followed by repeated purchases of several hundred second-hand cars from the German railways DB, mostly coming from the East German railways DR. Some of the purchased cars are of the same series that BDŽ already owned from deliveries in the 1970s and 1980s - these are listed together here in the overview. The modernisation programme for older cars, common on other railways from former Eastern Bloc, was implemented only to a limited extent at BDŽ. The only exception mentioned regarding the purchase of new cars after 1989 is the delivery of 30 new sleeper cars from the Turkish Tüvasaş wagon factory in 2012.