N. Kósa Judit - Szablyár Péter: Underground Buda - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2002)
Smoke under the surface - the railway tunnel at the Southern Station
solution lay in installing a new reservoir, larger than any of the existing ones. Thus the 80,000-cubic-metre system at Sánc utca was built. Suggesting the scale of the enterprise is the fact that at the start a 170,000- cubic-metre pit was sunk into the hillside, which then admitted the concrete colossi of the two reservoirs together with all the auxiliary equipment. The environment of the enormous underground plant was successively tidied up by landscape gardeners, and now the artificial hillock commands a wonderful view of the Tabán and the Castle Hill areas. The bottom level of the pools is 11.4 metres above that of the old reservoirs at Kelenhegy út. The two units are connected with a kilometre-long, 140-centimetre wide pipeline located in a conduit cutting across the hill. The engine room moving the water was built next to the old reservoirs. The levels of water filling the pools are adjusted by computer in line with the demands of the city. Smoke under the surface — the railway tunnel at the Southern Station Lovers on their way to Lake Balaton do not have to wait long before they can exchange the first kiss in the dark: a few hundred yards from the Southern Station, having clanked through a series of switching points, their train disappears in a smoke-filled tunnel to re-emerge, after a few hundred yards, in a completely different urban environment. Few are aware that the tunnel leading to the former Buda Railway Station marks an important phase in the railway-building boom that began after the oppressive years of the so-called Bach era following the defeat of Hungary's 1848-48 War of Independence. Established in 1856, the Francis Joseph Eastern Railway Company (which was called Imperial and Royal Railway Company, or Southern Railways for short, after 1867) formally opened its Buda-Nagykanizsa line on 1 April 1861. The determination of where to locate the Buda (today Southern) Railway Station was subject to large-scale plans of urban development. It was a major criterion that the station should be easily accessible from the recently opened Tunnel under Castle Hill, and that it should be located at the intersection of the increasingly busy thoroughfares of Buda. Mayor Ferenc Reitter put forward a plan which would have connected the State Railway Station (today Western Station) with the Buda Station via a 41
