Visiting a rail museum in Budapest

My wife and I recently returned from a short trip to Prague, Bratislava and Budapest, and among the activities always interesting to watch on such a trip is railroading. We were pretty busy seeing the standard sights, and there wasn’t a great deal of time for trains, but in Budapest I had a little free time and took the opportunity to go off to the Transport Museum in City Park there. It is really an impressive museum.
     Here are two views of the 4-8-0 locomotive preserved outside the building.

Posed in front of the engine in the second view is Geoff Rezek, to whom I am indebted for these museum views, as he had his camera and I didn’t have mine.
     Inside, numerous original locomotives were preserved, along with many really excellent 1:5 models of a wide range of other engines. This view shows a small fraction of the collection, but gives an idea of the arrangement.

     While at the museum, I found a current copy of the local model magazine, which I show below. Its title means “Train and Model.”

     I enjoyed the interior of the magazine too, though I don’t read Magyar (Hungarian). The model and prototype photos are self-explanatory. One thing I especially liked was this advertisement:

The headline means, approximately, “you’d like to go here,” and I always enjoy (restrained) humor in modeling.
     The company, Miha Modell, is a German firm making Code 250 rail in both steel and nickel-silver, as well as tie strip and wheelsets for large-scale modeling. Their web site is: http://www.miha-modell.de/ and the considerable scope of their products is evident there.

     I describe all these matters not as a tribute to a specific museum, though it is a good one, but to illustrate that taking the opportunity to explore whatever railroad-related sights are handy, can often be interesting and fun.

Tony Thompson