Over on Caboodle.hu today we see that there is a shiny new international ticket terminal at Keleti station that promises to make train travel in Hungary more convenient and spiffy. Which is just super, even if you’re not comparing it to the ongoing horrors taking place in the metro tubes a few dozen meters beneath.
While state railway MÁV was basking in the glow of its shiny new nemzetközi jegypénztár, the Budapest Transport Center – the body recently put in charge of Budapest’s crisis-wracked public transit system – was fending off reports that it plans to put 40-year-old metro trains recently found to be dangerous back into service.
According to a report in tabloid Blikk, the BKK will be rolling back out some trains retired this summer after engineers who examined them following repeated incidents of the cars smoking or catching fire said they were good to go.
Meanwhile, two cases of metro trains starting to smoke were reported last week. On October 24th, a train on line 3 (the blue line) started smoking at the Népliget station, due to a faulty transmission shaft. The following day on the No. 2 line passengers were rescued from a train that was engulfed in smoke after a short-circuit in a 40-year-old traction motor while the carriage was stopped – you guessed it – under the Keleti railway station. All aboard!
And I thought that smoking was forbidden on the Metro …
hahahahahah…