The Valdai 45R is a modern shallow-draft river hydrofoil of Project 23180, carrying 45 passengers. The series is built in-house by the Alekseev CKB for Hydrofoils at its production site in the Chkalovsk district of Nizhny Novgorod Oblast; the lead vessel was launched in 2017. [1]
A small ship for small rivers
The Valdai 45R continues the line of shallow-draft river vessels descended from the Belarus (ship) and Polesye (ship) classes: forty-five passengers, shallow draft, service on rivers a larger vessel could not navigate. [1]
The production side matters too: the bureau builds the ships itself, at its own site in the Chkalovsk district — the same site where Alekseev's test base had stood since the early 1960s. Design and construction came back together in the same hands. [1][2] The lead ship of the series was unveiled in May 2018 at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, and during the 2019 navigation season the Valdai 45R carried more than four thousand passengers on routes from Nizhny Novgorod to Gorodets and Makaryevo. [2]
Sources
- spkfleet.ru — Valdai 45R ship (archive)
- ckbspk.ru — "Hope" of river passenger transport