The Underground Museum, District V

Transport went more smoothly in days gone by

Incredible as it may seem to anyone who has read about the difficult birth of the fourth metro in the papers in the last year or two, Budapest’s first metro line was built without a hitch.

The Underground Museum, normally hidden by passengers queuing to buy tickets in Deák tér station, tells the tale of continental Europe’s first underground in a pleasantly old-fashioned way. The nearest it gets to an interactive experience is when visitors have to validate their metro tickets in the punch at the entrance.

Even by the standards of museums it is quiet, with the silence only occasionally disturbed by the rattling of trains in the nearby tunnel.

Electrifying development

As the museum relates, concerns that surface transport like trams would have sullied the capital’s most elegant street – now known as Andrássy út – led the authorities to choose to build a metro.

After 21 months of construction, the line opened on 2 May 1896, in time for the millennium celebrations in the City Park.

The Földalatti (literally “underground”) is by far Budapest’s most impressive mode of public transport, even if the original tiling of the stations gives them the air of a Victorian public loo, a style that the museum also mirrors.

The line’s one major technical innovation was that it was electrified right from the start. This represented a huge leap forward in passenger comfort compared to the world’s first underground lines in London, where steam locomotives were used for several lung-busting decades.

Many of the exhibits relate to the construction of the line. The museum also contains a section of full-sized track with three old trains that once ran on the line. In addition, there is a model of Emperor Franz Joseph’s train. In true royal style, he needed his own vehicle to travel the less than four-kilometre long line.

The displays include memorabilia demonstrating innovations in the running of the line like the introduction of female staff during the First World War.

The museum also tells the story of the odd-looking bridge between the Museum of Fine Arts and the lake in the City Park which appears to go nowhere as a result of a change in the line’s route.

Touch the past

The museum guidebook (HUF 150) could itself be one of the exhibits. It clearly reflects the era it was produced in: “The Underground Railway Museum has been brought into existence on the basis of a socialist contract.”

In what – in the light of the later political squawking – looks touchingly optimistic, the guide contains a map showing the fourth and fifth metro lines, which were planned at the time of the guide’s publication in 1977. If everything had gone to schedule, they could probably have their own museum now. Instead, the fourth metro is nothing more than a series of big holes dotted around the city and the fifth is just pie in the sky at present.

The museum is a pleasant enough way to spend an hour or so, but it might make an uncomfortable visit for local politicians.