Szablyár Péter: Step by step - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2010)
When the stairs move along. the escalators of Budapest
photographer's studio working on the premises. With shopping malls in mind, one might say today that the department house anticipated the future. The escalators that started to work in 1931 blended into this innovative environment perfectly well. Under the "new economic mechanism" of the 1960s, escalators were once again installed in the building - "a must at Christmas” as the daft jingle went - that had changed ownership repeatedly. Choo-choo stairs ... It might look as though the paternalistic state of the 1950s took pity on the children of the time, whose demographic had grown rapidly in the wake of the forcefully increased birth-rates that resulted from the demographic policies enforced under then-welfare minister Anna Ratkó. Under the supervision of uniformed child railway personnel sporting red neckties, passengers of the Pioneer Railway (today the Széchenyi Children's Railway) could get from the tram terminus ín Hűvösvölgy to the building of the Hűvösvölgy Station by way of a short but real escalator on Sundays and holidays from the summer of the stormy year of 1956. The experience that designing, assembling and operating the escalator yielded could later be put to some good use with the bigger escalators leading down to the stations of the 2nd underground line sunk deep under the surface. After stoppages of varying lengths, the experimental escalator was closed down permanently in 1973 and later disassembled. Escalators in Budapest's underground railway system Although the first underground railway line in continental Europe was built at the end of the 19th century in Budapest, the construction of a deep-tunnel system could not be undertaken until after World War 11 and then only with the technological support of the Soviet Union, whose know-how was imported. Moscow's metro system was unique in the Eastern hemisphere at the time, but the combined length of its lines is still the fourth largest in the world. (This ran to 243.6 kilometres in 1995, with 150 stations, where the number of passengers carried daily was at 8 million 723 thousand, with trains following each other at an average frequency of one per 85 seconds and the number of personnel employed at 24,615.) The deep stations of the Budapest metro are accessible via escalators. These were installed in what are called inclined mother gates sunk with shaft-mining methods. The structural composition of these and their historical development can well illustrate the evolution of tunnel-digging technologies. The inclined mother gates were secured with cast-iron tubbing segments (relatively thin-walled, ribbed wall units 55
