Várnagy Zoltán: Urban Transportation - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1994)
held on Stalin’s seventieth birthday. The service was given number 70, a route that runs to this day, partly following the route of the now extinct tram no. 10, between Kossuth Lajos tér and Erzsébet királyné út in Zugló. These soft running trolleys even inspired a ditty, a line of which goes: “At this stop I wait for trolleys oft, To come around the corner swift and soft...” After the first route, more trolley lines were built in rapid succession. These included the line between Kossuth tér and Margit Bridge, the one connecting Marx (today Nyugati) tér to Keleti (Eastern) Station, and the route running from Orczy tér to the city centre. The latter, no. 74, replaced a tram service in Baross utca. Route 75, between Népliget and Váci út, was opened on 31 December, 1954, and two years later line 76 was put into operation to connect Jászai Mari tér and Keleti Station. For a long time, these routes were serviced by trolleys imported from the Soviet Union, but most of the vehicles used today are Hungarian-made Ikaruses. When the second five-year plan was being drawn up in 1959, the issue of opening trolley routes in the hills was raised, but the idea was soon abandoned for good. This period saw the trolley losing ground to other means of transport, as it was not its advantages (quiet and non-polluting), but its disadvantages that were taken into consideration (overhead wires frequently broke, the costs involved were higher than with buses, and electric power in general was in short supply). The Transport Department of the city council worked out a plan for phasing out the trolleybus system altogether. The first step was to be the replacement of trolleys by buses first on route 74 along Baross utca in 1971, and then on line 75 along Hungária körút in 1972, but the authorities only managed to put route 74 out of service in 1973, as sky-rocketing oil prices pushed up the operating costs of buses. In 1976 another resolution was passed, this time to develop the system. Since April 1977, trolleys have been running between Madách tér and Csáktornya park. Route 79 has been extended along Pozsonyi út, where it replaced the 15 tram. Development on the largest scale was implemented in Zugló, where, besides routes mentioned above, there are the no. 80 trolleys 36
