New Life Steams Into Rusting Locomotives

Lenin’s portrait still graces the wall, but his scowl can’t dampen Istvan Szikora’s labor of love -- saving Hungary’s old steam trains from extinction.

Every morning at dawn, Szikora’s steps echo through a massive repair shed on the outskirts of Budapest. Inside, rows of rusting locomotives, some missing wheels or funnel smokestacks, are waiting for retired railway workers like Szikora to give them a new life.

“Just one more train renovation, and then I’m really going to retire,” said Szikora, 67, repeating a promise to himself made a hundred times before. Then he added quietly: “Or perhaps just two more, if my health stands up.”

Nearly 2,000 workers once kept hundreds of steam engines in service throughout the country before they were replaced by cheaper-to-run diesel and electric locomotives.

Now, Szikora is one of 20 men -- mostly retirees -- still working at Hungarian State Railways’ steam engine workshop. They’ve been repairing several trains for display at the national railway museum and for summertime nostalgia trips for tourists.

That the locomotives have survived is credited to forward-thinking railway workers, back in communist times, who didn’t want to see them disappear.

“We realized when the steam trains were being phased out that one day there would be a wave of nostalgia for them,” said Gyula Rupnik, 69, the shop’s works manager. “So despite opposition from the management, we tried to save as many of them as we could.”

Under the socialist system that ruled Hungary and the rest of Eastern Europe through 1990, that meant getting the workers to help.

“We convinced the former conductors of the locomotives to ask the Communist Party and the state-owned railway company to preserve them,” Rupnik said. “Many of them were put on display on pedestals outside railway stations, and the former conductor and his family have looked after them ever since.”

For the last few years, Rupnik and his enthusiasts have been collecting the engines and getting them back on the rails.

But although Lenin’s portrait has been allowed to stay, the communist red stars that once adorned all the locomotives are gone.

“The government banned the red star after the transition to democracy in the early ‘90s because it was a symbol of dictatorship,” Rupnik said. “But that means we can’t put it back on the trains, even though historically it belongs on the front of their boilers.”

Most of the engines are Hungarian, the oldest dating from the 1880s.

In the 1950s, Hungarian factories turned out hundreds of engines to replace those taken as war booty or reparations after World War II.

But there was a cuckoo in the nest, said repairman Andras Vass, 41, pointing proudly to a photograph of a U.S.-made steam engine from the 1940s that he renovated single-handedly.

Hundreds of American-made “Truman” engines, named after the late President Truman, came over with U.S. forces to move military equipment around the continent.

Many remained on both sides of the Iron Curtain after the war ended, some serving in Hungary until the early 1980s.

“I used to see Trumans passing by the end of our garden when I was a child,” Vass said. “It was the most beautiful locomotive I ever saw.”

When the engines were retired, Vass persuaded the rail company to let him have one. He spent six years renovating it before giving it to the national railway museum.

“The communists really gave the Truman a bad name to make their own locomotives look good, even though the Truman was far superior,” Vass said. “Sometimes they broke Trumans up and used parts from them to make the Hungarian engines better.”

Despite the enthusiasm of younger repairmen like Vass, “the younger ones will never really know what it was like to work in those days,” Szikora said, “even if here time stands still.”