Children's Railway

We had a fun time as we took the Children's Railway. Of course first we had to take a bus to this out of the way place which used to be a "camp" for children trained to be pioneers during Communist times. The Széchenyi-hegyi Children's Railway is operated by children under the supervision of adults. This 8-mile train line is not electrified and traffic services on the railway are provided by children aged 10-14 getting them in the Guinness Book of Records. It is a “regular” railway with ticket offices, diesel locomotives, signals, switches and a timetable. As ticket inspectors, lock-breakers, valuables sellers, public address announcers, platform guards and cashiers, children learn to behave towards foreign passengers, to perform their tasks confidently, to provide information, to communicate with both younger children and adults and how to handle money. The operators, recorders and switch operators learn the sequences of actions to be taken in connection with the operation of trains, and to operate passenger information equipment. Their work is supervised and assisted by adult (responsible) railway employees.

As we found in the Retro “Communist” Museum, the train was part of a propaganda programing the 50’s and 60’s. The Pioneer Railway was a tool of socialist education. The youth brigades cut down the forest and laid the track. In parallel with the railway construction, instructors prepared the first comrades for the rules of railway operation and traffic management. Getting into the Pioneer Railway was equivalent to the prestige of a successful university admission. After the Communist era the name of the institution was changed to the Children's Railway and its operation was transferred to the main long-distance/international train operator, MÁV (Hungarian State Railways).

These days, children in the 4th-6th grade of elementary school who have a high academic average and physical ability can apply for the children's railway course with parental and school consent. During the course, they learn traffic knowledge, signaling knowledge, local knowledge, telecommunications and security equipment, and trade. Children who have passed the exams perform at least 5 apprenticeships, where they are assigned older child railway passengers to assist in their practical training. Their sense of responsibility is increased by the fact that their work is and by the fact that being a child railway passenger has prestige in the eyes of both their own age group and adults. There were over 700 children trained last year.

Ironically, we did not have enough local currency to ride the train and they would only take the full amount or nothing and didn't take credit cards ... so we were given a FREE RIDE!

From there we took the train back to the city, walked around an area we had not been to in Budapest and then went to the Cinema Mystica Museum.Læs mere