Saturday, April 9, 2016

But Dean, how was the Budapest metro?!

So glad you asked.



Budapest's subway system is a very special one actually, it is the second oldest in the world, after the London Underground, and has been running under the city since 1896!

The system is made up of four lines:

M4 - Green Line: this is the newest line, the trains are nearly silent and the stations are kinda futuristic, the running stock is the same as several other cities including Istanbul where I will be soon.



M3 - Blue Line: clearly from when Hungary was part of the USSR, awesome old blue tin toaster looking cars, loud and rough and wonderful.



M2 - Red Line: the heavy lifting line, appears to handle the majority of traffic, same style of cars as the M4 but older and louder



M1 - Yellow Line: what a cool surprise the yellow line turned out to be, this is the original line from 1896 and what I didn't expect was that this line still runs the ooooollld trains in the old stations, so cute.





But what about signage and right-of-ways you ask?

Pretty good but when compared to Prague it's a bit of a mess, in quite a few stations the signage indicating which fork you should be taking is actually after that fork, you have to go right or left to find the signs telling you if you needed to go right or left, this leads to a lot of doubling back.

On the plus side most stations have a bakery in them, right underground and not just a kiosk with baked goods but a real little self contained bakery with ovens and rhe whole deal. These stations smell awesome.

No comments:

Post a Comment