Tamás the Tank Engine

One beautiful day about a month ago, we walked out to Budapest's railway museum. I took lots of pictures, but didn't really have a great deal to say about trains, apart from the fact that some of the ones there made me think of Tom Courtenay and the train he travelled in in the film of Dr Zhivago. Then I came across this little video clip compilation, and I thought - well, what did I think? I thought, gosh, trains are quite fun and I've got a whole collection of photographs of old trains that might interest someone or other, so I might as well stick them in a blog post. 

And so here they are.

This is the entrance to the museum, which I think used to be a railway station. It is, not unsurprisingly, very close to the railway workers' flats I mentioned in this post.

This fellow is supposedly the Unknown Worker, dedicated to all the thousands of workers involved in post-war reconstruction. In 1946, he was placed on a prominent corner of Andrássy ut, the beautiful avenue that leads to Budapest's Heroes' Square. He later got moved about, according to political eddies.

The sculptor's name was Turáni Kovács Imre. I would have to say that, for a figure who is supposed to have an anonymous, everyman appearance, he bears an uncanny resemblance to the man who my father liked to refer to as "Dirty Linen", aka leader of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 24.

This one is newer and also didn't always stand at the museum. It is called railway builder and, if you really truly want any more details about it, write to me and I'll pass them on. 

This is a model of the Eastern Railway Station. I don't know why it appealed to me, given I can walk up and look at the real thing any time I please. I think I find miniaturised copies of real-life things attractive. They are usually done with great care and there is absolutely no point to them, and I'm always drawn to things that demand skill to make and have no function.

Outside the hall where the miniaturised Eastern Railway Station stands, a whole semi-circle of train carriages stood. One of my daughters rang while I was looking at them and described the difficulties of having returned to work but having to do her job while wearing all sorts of visors and masks and who knows what. I became so absorbed in this conversation that I very nearly fell into a large deep concrete hole that is just to the right of the edge of this photograph. I am not sure I would be writing this or anything else if I had fallen. But, luckily, I noticed it in the nick of time. Phew.

After that little excitement, I strolled around rather aimlessly photographing everything I saw out of sheer happiness that I wasn't lying at the bottom of a concrete hole.

This little signal box, or whatever it is, seemed to have come straight out of a toy railway set:

I suppose the whole museum had the slight feel of a toy railway set in which suddenly we were to scale with the toys.

I assume this car that only runs on rails had something to do with dragging trains about but I did wonder if when they first invented cars they might have thought that they could only work like trains, running along laid track. A car of one's own rather than mixing with everyone else in actual train carriages would have been beyond deluxe first class. Although no dining car might have made it in certain respects disappointing.

I climbed into this one and tried to imagine dealing with its enormous boiler and controls:

Among all these handles and gauges and oil and coal, there was this sweet little emblem, screwed on to one of the engine carriage walls:

This was the one I thought could have been in Dr Zhivago. Splendid in its own way.

I was very surprised by the pointed ones - could they possibly have been designed as some kind of weapon, rather than mere transport?

In the shed where the model of the Eastern Railway Station stands, they also had a framed copy of an old timetable from 3rd October, 1913, in other words just before everything went horribly wrong:

The timetable hung near this carriage, which is exactly the kind of thing that makes me love Hungary. I cannot imagine any other country making something like this:

So far as I can tell it was made in order to be able to carry St Stephen's hand (normally kept here in Budapest in the basilica in the Vth district) all around the country, which it did between 1938 and 1942. 

Right next to this magnificent, gaudy thing, stood the most Thomas the Tank Engine-like engine in the place:

I liked the plain wooden interior of its carriage, although it must have been pretty hard going to sit in over any distance:

Here in all its magnificence is the coach that led us to go to the train museum in the first place, the dining car of the Orient Express from 1912:

Having walked seven and a half kilometres from our place to the museum, we were not a little disappointed that seeing inside it was just one more pleasure we were to be deprived of by the virus that we are all now ruled by. No one else was there, but, you know, enclosed spaces, can't be too careful. 

Grrr. 

This, by the way, one my prize for cuddliest train engine of the museum.