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Description
This is the Gyermekvasút, the Children's Railway of Budapest.

First found in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, these institutions quickly spread across Eastern-Europe, and many of them survived the fall of the iron curtain. The basic idea was to give youngsters a chance to gain some hands-on experience in the world of railroading, and the best way of doing that is by actually working with trains. So what we have here is a narrow gauge railway line that is almost completely operated by 10-14 year old children. They set the signals, they throw the switches, make the announcments, sell tickets, signal the driver to depart, help the crews while shunting and so forth.

Before you ask, no, they don't work the locomotives, as the law requires drivers to be at least 18 years of age, and that profession also requires experience that children couldn't have gained by that age.

The station you see here is the terminus Hüvösvölgy, which is also home to the maintenance workshops, as well as the children's (and adults') living quarters. Trains run every hour, with the rolling stock depending on the season. Closed carriages with wood-burning stoves inside for winter, and open carriages for summer. The locomotives are Romanian road switchers from the 1970s, but the railway also posesses several historic DMUs from 1929, a 1950s diesel, as well as two steam engines from 1942. Those are of course only used for nostalgia trains.

The line is single track, 760mm gauge, with a siding at most of the seven intermediate stations, track speed usually being limited to a mere 20kph/13mph. Construction of the railway began in 1948, but it took till 1950 for it to be fully operational. The line's total length comes down to 11.2 kilometers or 7 miles, meandering through the hills of Buda, with one trip normally taking between 40 and 50 minutes. Unusually for such small narrow gauge lines, the Gyermekvasút incorporates five different train protection systems, from simple securing bolts and semaphores all the way to electronic switchboards and optical signals, so that the aspiring railroaders can learn all aspects of the craft. However, only the stations feature such equipment, the tracks in between them don't have any kind of signaling or train protection system, which means that only one train can run on such a section at any given time.

I remember riding these trains when I was little, and I have visited this line several times ever since, both in summer and in winter. I would've loved to ride it again when I shot this, but I was running out of time, and had a plane to catch in the afternoon.

Oh well, at least I now have some photos to share with you.

Description
This is the Gyermekvasút, the Children's Railway of Budapest.

First found in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, these institutions quickly spread across Eastern-Europe, and many of them survived the fall of the iron curtain. The basic idea was to give youngsters a chance to gain some hands-on experience in the world of railroading, and the best way of doing that is by actually working with trains. So what we have here is a narrow gauge railway line that is almost completely operated by 10-14 year old children. They set the signals, they throw the switches, make the announcments, sell tickets, signal the driver to depart, help the crews while shunting and so forth.

Before you ask, no, they don't work the locomotives, as the law requires drivers to be at least 18 years of age, and that profession also requires experience that children couldn't have gained by that age.

The station you see here is the terminus Hüvösvölgy, which is also home to the maintenance workshops, as well as the children's (and adults') living quarters. Trains run every hour, with the rolling stock depending on the season. Closed carriages with wood-burning stoves inside for winter, and open carriages for summer. The locomotives are Romanian road switchers from the 1970s, but the railway also posesses several historic DMUs from 1929, a 1950s diesel, as well as two steam engines from 1942. Those are of course only used for nostalgia trains.

The line is single track, 760mm gauge, with a siding at most of the seven intermediate stations, track speed usually being limited to a mere 20kph/13mph. Construction of the railway began in 1948, but it took till 1950 for it to be fully operational. The line's total length comes down to 11.2 kilometers or 7 miles, meandering through the hills of Buda, with one trip normally taking between 40 and 50 minutes. Unusually for such small narrow gauge lines, the Gyermekvasút incorporates five different train protection systems, from simple securing bolts and semaphores all the way to electronic switchboards and optical signals, so that the aspiring railroaders can learn all aspects of the craft. However, only the stations feature such equipment, the tracks in between them don't have any kind of signaling or train protection system, which means that only one train can run on such a section at any given time.

I remember riding these trains when I was little, and I have visited this line several times ever since, both in summer and in winter. I would've loved to ride it again when I shot this, but I was running out of time, and had a plane to catch in the afternoon.

Oh well, at least I now have some photos to share with you.