Red star train graveyard
s30 minutes away from the centre of Budapest is a train workshop, half very live, half mostly dead. I have read a lot about this train yard mostly after we went, but the word eerie is used a lot - It’s not eerie or haunting. It is fascinating though.
There are a lot of pictures on the web about the train graveyard, that have been sold to raise the profile and deepen the pockets of some of the people who have been; with stories appearing in lots of (the more trashy) newspapers and websites. A lot of attention is given to the types of train and carriages within the sheds, with people citing that they were used to take Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz. One article in a well-known paper shows a picture of a train within the shed and an old black and white photograph of an Auschwitz train to show how they are the same; the only issue with this is that they are not! The black and white photograph shows a similar but different train with a different front end and a different number of wheel sets. The carriages do bear a striking resemblance to those used at the time for the transportation of people to concentration camps but without any validation and given the amount of the closed transportation cars that were about at the time of the Second World War this all remains hypothesis and theory.
That said the train yard is amazing, tacked onto the side of a very open and quite new repair hall for current rolling stock the dilapidated shed next door looks truly like it could fall down at any moment, outside there are mangled carriages and damaged trains from what can only be assumed as previous rail incidents that have been brought here for examination. Squeezing past those and through an open(!) door takes you into the shed itself and the many trains and carriages from past eras.
We spent a very nice uninterrupted 40 minutes in the shed, wandering and climbing, finally finding the infamous Red Star Train before making our exit as we were conscious not to out stay our welcome. Leaving the sheds behind us we took a wrong turn to our exit and found another Red Star Train!
Feeling very lucky and pleased with ourselves we left by the main gate waving a cheery thank you to the guard on our way out.
There are a lot of pictures on the web about the train graveyard, that have been sold to raise the profile and deepen the pockets of some of the people who have been; with stories appearing in lots of (the more trashy) newspapers and websites. A lot of attention is given to the types of train and carriages within the sheds, with people citing that they were used to take Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz. One article in a well-known paper shows a picture of a train within the shed and an old black and white photograph of an Auschwitz train to show how they are the same; the only issue with this is that they are not! The black and white photograph shows a similar but different train with a different front end and a different number of wheel sets. The carriages do bear a striking resemblance to those used at the time for the transportation of people to concentration camps but without any validation and given the amount of the closed transportation cars that were about at the time of the Second World War this all remains hypothesis and theory.
That said the train yard is amazing, tacked onto the side of a very open and quite new repair hall for current rolling stock the dilapidated shed next door looks truly like it could fall down at any moment, outside there are mangled carriages and damaged trains from what can only be assumed as previous rail incidents that have been brought here for examination. Squeezing past those and through an open(!) door takes you into the shed itself and the many trains and carriages from past eras.
We spent a very nice uninterrupted 40 minutes in the shed, wandering and climbing, finally finding the infamous Red Star Train before making our exit as we were conscious not to out stay our welcome. Leaving the sheds behind us we took a wrong turn to our exit and found another Red Star Train!
Feeling very lucky and pleased with ourselves we left by the main gate waving a cheery thank you to the guard on our way out.
