CSD advertisement for the SM 500 'Chrochtadlo' DMU

Translation :

"Czechoslovak State Railways

Leave the grey past behind you...
Travel swiftly and comfortably across our entire homeland.
Travel aboard the new Series 860 rail motor cars !
With ČSD, the bright future of trains begins already today."

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A somewhat silly alternate history advertisement poster from communist era Czechoslovakia (ČSSR). This isn't for any of my timeline projects, it's just a random standalone dedicated to a "What could have been" rail and rolling stock development. A story with a promising start and middle, but rather sadly, a premature and disappointing end.

In our history, late 1960s communist Czechoslovakia saw some increased efforts by the Czechoslovak State Railways (ČSD) to replace and modernise their fleet of smaller rolling stock used for local and regional passenger transport. There were two strands of the whole endeavour : Larger, more powerful and more comfortable DMU railcars for primarily regional passenger service, and smaller, simpler, more inexpensive railbuses for local lines (for routes of only tens of kilometers at most).

One of the most promising of these new rolling stock projects was the 860 Series of regional railcars, nicknamed chrochtadlo ("grunter"). Alternatively, you can think of them as a kind of large and comfy railbus or a hybrid of railbus and railcar/DMU types. Unfortunately, the higher ups at the Ministry of Transport and some people in the Slovak and Czech factories that were supposed to produce additional engines put the kibosh on the whole project in 1979. By then, it had already waited several years to get greenlit for serial production. So, the 860 was not to be and only two fully operational prototypes were ever finished.

Both of the surviving 860 DMU prototypes were not scrapped and they served in the vicinity of Prague for many years as auxilliary rolling stock or even regular passenger liners. They were finally decomissioned in 1997, due to a crippling lack of spare parts. One of the surviving prototypes (001) had been bought by the National Museum of Technology in 2007 and there are plans to gradually restore it and put it on display. The second surviving prototype (002) is to be acquired by the museum as well, but the deal hasn't been finalized yet.

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"Behind the scenes" note

I've tried to imbude this fictional poster's slogans with the typical "the past was awful, a bright future awaits us" propagandistic subtext that was all too common in commie era Czechoslovak adverts. The bright new modern train rolling into a station from an old photograph is exactly the kind of silliness I'd expect from such an upbeat, patriotism-pumping poster at a train station in the 1970s.

The station shown in the "old photo" portion of the poster is the one in Náchod.

P.S. As I'm not a native speaker of Czech, I apologise for any possible typos or grammar errors in the poster.