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

nibus was followed by the horse tramway, the tram, the bus, the suburban train, the underground railway, and finally, after the Second World War, by the metro system.

Tömegközlekedés, the Hungarian term meaning “public transport”, is a compound made up of the word tömeg coined by the poet Vörösmarty to denote “mass”, and közlekedés, a word first used in the sense of “traffic, transportation” in 1838. The new term appeared in the twentieth century when passenger counts in annual reports made by transport companies had seven-digit figures.

City rail network

Pest’s first horse-drawn tramway car, which departed, with municipal aldermen and journalists on board, from outside the Lutheran church in Deák tér on 30 July, 1866, was the third of its kind in Europe. It connected the two termini at Szénapiac (Hay Market, today Kálvin tér) and at the shipyards of the First Pest-Fiume Shipbuilding Co. in outer Újpest, with stops at the National Museum, the Café Zrínyi (today Astoria), Saint Stephen’s Basilica and the Railway Station (today Nyugati, i.e. Western Station). The horse tramway’s first terminus building, the “Hunters’ Manor”, by the Northern Railway Bridge survives to this day. It took a carriage 35 minutes to cover the nine kilometres’ distance. Each of the twelve cars in service made fourteen round trips a day, which meant a total of 168 journeys. Divide that by the 12 hours of daily service, and the result is fourteen departures per hour, which means that every four and a half minutes another carriage would appear on Múzeum körút. Within a few days of the official opening, one could only buy a ticket in advance due to the public’s phenomenal curiosity, and even so the cars were crammed to capacity. Overcrowding on Pest’s public transport thus dates back to the appearance of the first rail carriage.

The Szénapiac-CIjpest line was built by the Pest Street Railway Company, a firm established by Sándor Károlyi & Co., the same entrepreneurs who constructed the Városliget (City Park) and Kőbánya lines two years later, in 1868. At first, the horse tramway only had single

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