Várnagy Zoltán: Urban Transportation - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1994)

ELECTRIC AMD STEAM PROPULSION SIDE BY SIDE

At the first set of points the writer Jókai stepped on the lines proclaiming that, as the owner of a plot and a house on Sváb Hill, he had the right to stop the train. “You shall not move a yard ahead before you take me on board your puffing tea kettle,” he exclaimed. Undersecretary of state Ernő Holtán, the chief of ceremonies, stopped the train laughing. Jumping over hedge and ditch, his braided coat torn in the blackthorn bush, waving with his summer periwig, Jókai clambered on board to join us with perspiration pearling his brow.

It is a cogwheel or driving pinion rotating in the engine and meshing with an indented bar or rack between the two rails that pulls the train up sharp rises, and the same cogwheel holds the train back to slow it on its way downhill. The cogwheel railway has a single track with passing trains pulling into sidings. In place of the earlier shunts, the sidings are now equipped with ordinary points. At the time of its opening the cogwheel railway offered no cheap entertainment even to its middle-class passengers as one fare cost 50 krajcárs. The line which originally ended at Sváb Hill was extended to reach Széchenyi Hill in 1890. To the fleet of steam engines, a petrol one was added in 1925, an experiment which turned out well. The following year saw a change in ownership with the cogwheel railway becoming munici22