Szablyár Péter: Step by step - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2010)

Budapest's stair-shaped hillside trains: Margaret and Gellért, till death do them part

in 16 months, to be operated by the Budapest Uphill Rail Line Company. The 96-metre long, standard-gauge (1435 mm) track inclining at a pitch of 30 degrees is used by cable- linked twin carriages powered now by electricity driven by an electric motor housed at the hilltop end. The northern pair of rails is used by the carriage called "Margaret," while "Gellért” runs on the southern ones. Each of the two has a capacity of 24 passengers. On the request of passengers, the speed of 10.8 kilometres per hour was reduced by half in 1888. Only one accident has ever happened, in the year of the Millenary Celebrations (17 June 1896). Overloaded with a crowd of foreign journalists departing from a prime-ministerial reception, one of the carriages broke loose, and the safety system designed as backup in the event of brake failure also malfunctioned.

During the siege of the Buda Castle in 1944 the hilltop station and the carriage stopping there were destroyed, but the driving gear, the boiler and the carriage stopping at the station below survived. Regarded as a relic of the feudal system, the funicular was demolished in 1948—49, its track to be filled up with rubbish thrown down its length from above. The intact steam engine, the boiler and the driving system were scrapped to be recycled as raw material for the "country of iron and steel" with the rope-tightening disc above being removed to a mine in the south Transdanubian region there to aid the heroic efforts of Socialism to win the country’s battles on the coal front.

The programme of reconstruction of the castle district approved by the Council of Ministers in i960 provided for the rebuilding of the funicular, too. Later on several studies with conflicting conclusions were prepared; one of these called for the installation of an escalator in the place of the former funicular, with another urging the development of the more flexible bus service. Still later, grass-roots initiatives conjointly with a centenary exhibition held in the Museum of Transport drew attention to the reconstruction of the funicular once again, which is why it was included in the comprehensive plan of the Buda Castle rehabilitation. A study prepared in 1980 put the cost of reconstruction at 68 million forints thus fanning hopes of a feasible reconstruction. After several years of dormancy, plans were eventually dusted off and the track of the funicular was in fact reconstructed in 1985, when new carriages were built, and then the Sikló was reopened to the public forty years after its destruction. The year seeing the largest passenger count was 1943 when 2,134,126 people travelled on the funicular. While earlier it carried an annual average of half a million people, today this peculiar vehicle providing a unique view of the city is used by nearly six hundred-thousand people a year. Rumours — possibly urban legends - of the impending privatisation of the Sikló have been in circulation for years; hopefully, this Methuselah of the Castle Hill slopes will survive that, too.

59