Várnagy Zoltán: Urban Transportation - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1994)
original amount of government subsidy has multiplied, and yet there is not enough money either for maintenance or for replacement of trams as vehicles and their spare parts have become increasingly expensive. For a long time trams played an important part in moving freight as well as passenger transportation. In the second half of the last century, the country’s railway system fuelled industrial development as one of its auxiliaries and driving forces. Mass production became possible with the feasibility of products being transported to faraway markets. Raw materials were shipped to factories and end products were then sent to dealers and customers by train. It was also by train that cattle and pigs arrived at the slaughterhouses or grain got to the mills providing big cities with food. It was via industrial side lines that carriages were forwarded directly from stations to factories established right beside railway lines. Thus cars are pulled from the Kőbánya Hizlaló (Kőbánya Pig-Farm) station, a subsidiary of Ferencváros Railway Terminal, to the Kőbánya-based salt-pack- aging works. However, several places were serviced by horse trams or, later, by electric trams. It was on these tram tracks that grey motor units known as “Muki” drew wagons carrying goods to their destinations in the city. Freight is now forwarded by lorries large and small, though these are far noisier than those trams were, and they are also the source of bad environmental pollution. This is part of the larger tendency of the railways losing ground, unnecessarily, to other forms of freight transportation. Shipping goods by tram, which was a considerable business at one time, has by now almost entirely been replaced by cheaper and more flexible forms of road transportation. UNDERGROUND TRANSPORT The first underground railway on the European Continent opened in Budapest in 1896 and connected Széchenyi Baths and Gizella (today Vörösmarty) tér. The cars used at that time continued in service right up to 1973. Trains would emerge from their underground tunnel before reaching the Zoo station. Pedestrians could cross the lines on a footbridge by the City Park lake. The underground railway, which carried as many 18
