N. Kósa Judit - Szablyár Péter: Underground Pest - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2002)

A tunnel for cables under the Danube

vided by fans pushing seven cubic metres of air into the system. To relieve the cables of the heat they generated, a self-contained water-cooling system was installed, which was originally fed from separate wells but later was replaced by water from the mains of the Budapest Waterworks. With this system the annually increasing amount of cables was kept at a steady temperature for years. Pumps with a capacity of 85 litres per minute were installed, which proved sufficient to siphon off seepage until the floods of 1954, when back-up pumps had to be put in.

The construction of the cable tunnel was concluded in the autumn of 1943, but during the siege of Budapest events took a drastic turn. Together with the bridges of the Danube, the newly finished and increasingly vital cable tunnel, too, was mined by the German army in 1944. András Dunay, a mechanical engineer who had played a leading part in the construction of the tunnel, and his associates succeeded in having the explosives removed from the tunnel below

■ New stalactite formations in the tunnel