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

Om summer weekends the nostalgia tram runs on the Pest

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effort to transfer the tramway companies into public ownership. In 1911 Mayor István Bárczy bought up 51 per cent of the Budapest City Electric Railway Company’s shares. The city’s aldermen also tried to get hold of shares in BVW (Budapest Street Railway Company), but without success. However, István Bárczy, as the majority shareholder, did manage to have himself elected chairman of the company’s board of directors.

Cinder government supervision, all companies were centrally controlled for a while even after a decree to nationalize them, passed by the Revolutionary Governing Council on 31 October, 1918, was annulled on 10 August, the following year. However, the Bethlen government decreed in 1921 that the Consolidated City Railways of Budapest was to continue operating as a general partnership. Then the municipality cancelled all the permits it had given the companies to use land in its possession, and decided to exercise its right, stipulated in the original contracts, to redeem the railways from their owners in order to improve the deteriorated conditions which then characterized the city’s public transport system. It was with that purpose that the Budapest Capital City Transport Co. (or, as the Hungar11