Chkalovsky Bus Plant

Chkalovsky Bus Plant ( ChAZ ) is a small-capacity bus manufacturer of the Tajikistan brand in Buston , Tajikistan .

Chkalovsky Bus Plant
Year of foundation	1953
Location	Tajikistan : Buston
Industry	Automotive
Products	Buses

Bus Rodnik-3230 in Kuzmolov

Bus Tajikistan-3205 in Tomsk

Since 1953, a car repair plant has been operating in the closed city of Chkalovsk (Leninabad-30) in the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic for the needs of the USSR Ministry of Medium Machine Building, which was involved in nuclear energy, including the country's first development of a uranium ore deposit at Combine No. 6 in the Leninabad Region Tajikistan.

In 1960, the company organized its own production of buses and it became a bus factory. Reliable and unpretentious buses produced by the plant worked like rotational shifts at other enterprises of the Ministry of Environment, including the closed city of Krasnoyarsk-26, now Zheleznogorsk , and at enterprises of other industries. In addition to buses, the factory since 1961 also produced trailers and semi-trailers, as well as tanks for them and the bodies of vans.

ChAZ buses had and have a carriage layout. For them, the chassis of the GAZ plant was used . The first model of the Tajikistan-1 plant with a wooden frame was created on the GAZ-51 chassis and the base of the small-series Kaunas Bus Plant KAG bus and was produced, having undergone a number of modifications, until 1976 .

Since 1970, the all-metal bus " Tajikistan-2 " developed at the factory at the GAZ-53 A chassis began to be produced simultaneously.

In the late 1970s, the remaining experimental buses Tajikistan-3 and Tajikistan-4 on the ZIL-130 chassis were produced in small batches.

They were followed by the new model “ Tajikistan-5 ” with a new body on the ZIL-130 chassis. The bus has 25 seats, the total number of seats is 42. After modernization, it was produced under the Tajikistan-3205 and ChAZ-3223 indexes.

At the turn of the 1980s and 1990s. At the plant, it was planned to produce small class 4209 buses developed on the ZIL-4333 chassis and 42091 middle class buses on the ZIL-4331 chassis developed by the Lviv VKEIavtobusprom . Master production before the collapse of the USSR failed.

After the collapse of the USSR , the joint venture Khujand-ZIL was created at the plant, which continued in small quantities the production of slightly modernized buses under the name ChAZ-3223 , including custom-made lots of passenger-and-freight, increased comfort, armored, refrigerated , ritual and other modifications. In 1995, the production of these buses (somewhat modified and called Rodnik-3230 ) was also organized in Russia , in the city of Rodniki ( Ivanovo Region ).