Buza Péter: Bridges of the Danube - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1999)

system to the needs of the users of the new bridge and the population of the districts affected.)

Due to the shortage of funds, municipal authorities have repeatedly had to put off construction of yet another bridge, planned to be erected further south, at Galvani utca. Completed designs include blueprints for cable, concrete and steel bridges but all versions envisage three-span bridges.

The less famous bridges

In Budapest there are other bridges not treated so far for various reasons. However, they all deserve some attention, so we’ll add a few words about them. These are the emergency bridges, the railway bridges and the bridges spanning only smaller Danube branches.

The Soviet military headquarters built pontoon and pile bridges using the ruins of the Petőfi and Szabadság Bridges and several emergency pontoon bridges. Apart from those, the first two pontoon bridges for civilian use connected Boráros tér with Műegyetem rakpart, and Petőfi tér with Döbren- tei tér. (The latter was in fact called Petőfi Bridge.) Meanwhile, already in 1945, the construction of a semi-permanent bridge began. The site had to be completely free of ruins thus the section between Kossuth tér and Batthyány tér was chosen. The Kossuth Bridge was 14 metres wide and could carry public transport vehicles. It was in full operation from January 1946 to the spring of 1956 when it was closed to motor traffic, to be eventually demolished in 1960. The site of its ramps is marked on either side of the river with a memorial stone.

Beside the Kossuth Bridge, in the first years after World War II, the pontoon bridges continued to play an important role. In the spring of 1946 the Manci was rebuilt at Margaret Island (see the chapter about the Margaret Bridge), Böske (the nickname of Erzsébet, the nearby bridge blasted into the river) or officially Petőfi between Petőfi tér and Döb53