Holló Szilvia Andrea: Budapest's Public Works - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2010)

Direct current versus alternating current

electricity obtained from that location. Long-distance transmission started on io July 1930 with a substation being built in Kárpát utca for the reception of electricity from the Transdanubian region. The inclusion of Bánhida turned out to be a lucky strike, as fewer stoppages were registered from that time on. With these measures, by the early 1930s, the authorities had succeeded in combining the electric distribution networks of Budapest in one integrated system. With the medium-voltage network (including two new stations installed between Hungária körút and Szentendrei út) they had managed to find a solution to efficient distribution as well as modifying tension levels. Overhead wires were no longer employed in the inner-city districts. From then on, no more generators were built in Budapest to satisfy further demands for electricity; the construction of a new power station was begun in the Mátra region instead.

Everything was going ahead according to plan when World War 11 broke out. The Kelenföld unit was affected right from the start when it was declared a war factory on 15 September 1939, its plant operation and business management being brought under central supervision together with all other public utilities in 1942.

Although the transmission lines under the bridges were exposed to aerial bombardment, the 450 metre long, approximately 1.80 metre high tunnel dug under the riverbed as an air-raid shelter was also used for the safe transmission of electricity from Kelenföld to the Pest side. In 1944 the Wehrmacht undermined the tunnel, but the Germans were persuaded of the efficiency of exploding the entrance only. This of course could not prevent the cables being damaged with the ones attached to the bridge being all broken, but when the Kelenföld power station was evacuated by the military, the lines laid inside the tunnel could still be used to conduct power from the Váci út station to Buda. (The tunnel was restored after the war, and since 1990 it has been preserved as a monument serving no practical purposes.)

World War II and the siege of Budapest caused severe destruction wiping out the substation on the Soroksári út, and the Bánhida transmission line. Only 13.2 kilometres of the cable network remained intact and of the high-voltage overhead conductors only 41 kilometres were spared. Forty percent of the 27,700 street lights were destroyed, with the rest damaged. The Budapest Capital City Waterworks, Gasworks and Electric Works regained their former independence, but restarting power generation met with difficulties as coal and underground cable reserves were only available at Kelenföld, but all the equipment had been taken away from there. And yet, on 12 May 1945, street lights in Kossuth Lajos utca and Rákóczi út went on. During the war the majority of floodlights had been destroyed. The first few temporary floodlights were put in place on the occasion of the celebrations marking the

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