Last Train To Budapest

I have a breakfast of black coffee in the Panzio then take the Metro to Nguyati to change some money. As I walk down Oktober 6 Utca to the K&H bank, I find a second-hand bookshop with English titles tucked away in a courtyard, almost invisible from the street. They have a small selection of paperbacks and I buy a tattered copy of Fatherland for a few hundred Forints. From the bank I cross back to the station for an espresso and study the timetable, looking for a destination where I can eek out the last of my funds for the next week. There are trains to Balaton, Pecs, and Esztergom, but little more than commuter services make up the rest of the departures. There are no M41 diesels here and certainly no Russian M62s; the M61 has made its last run of the year and is back in the museum, and only rows of V43 electrics occupy the platforms. I take the Metro to Keleti and resume my study there. There are departures to Minsk, Moscow, Berlin, Beograd, and Vienna; Zagreb, Kiev, Warsaw, and Hamburg. They are pulled by an assortment of V43s, V63s, Taurus electrics, and even a solitary M41 – I would catch them all if I could. I note down the times for Gyor instead; Budapest is too expensive to stay for very long, although I am grateful for its facilities after so long in the provinces. I take the tram back to Nagyvarad Ter and shop in the Prosi Elemmizer for food. I eat in my room, shower, change, and walk to the Metro station; for my last night in Budapest I take M3 to Deak Ter and sit in a dimly lit little bar off Deak Utca. There are no tourists here – they are drawn to the bright lights and high prices of the bars and restaurants that line the Danube – and I feel perfectly comfortable and at ease with the local crowd, much more so than I would on the banks of the river. A television on the wall is showing a national football match and there’s a great deal of good natured rivalry between the customers; nobody pays the slightest attention to the Englishman sitting in the corner in his Hungarian jacket reading a book about Germany. It is almost midnight when I catch the Metro back to my room; the underground station is quiet and eerie, echoing footsteps and the distant rumble of an approaching train enough to raise the hairs at the back of the neck. The train is empty and dimly lit; the entrance to Nagyvarad Ter, by contrast, is brightly illuminated and full of people lying on cardboard mattresses and old cushions. I tiptoe between the sleeping bundles, trying not to disturb what little comfort they have managed to find, thankful I will be sleeping between clean sheets in a warm room and not wrapped in a filthy blanket in a freezing station.
I take the 11.10 to Gyor in the morning and arrive two hours later in a rainstorm. I walk to the TourInform booth in the Platz and book a room in a charming little Panzio down a cobbled alley in the old town. I am soaked to the skin by the time I reach my room, and as soon as I close the door the rain stops. I walk through the old baroque town to the riverfront where the market is held a couple of times a week. The traders are local people with produce from their smallholdings and gardens, the paprika and onions and leafy headed bunches of carrots displayed on upturned cardboard boxes; business is brisk, and the half dozen stalls cooking sausages for the shoppers to eat with hunks of bread are doing a roaring trade. As the afternoon draws in and the traders start packing up for the day there is a flurry of snow: the thermometer in the square says 2 degrees and falling, and a bitter wind has sprung up. I eat a meal of catfish soup at a tiny bar facing the River Raba under a low vaulted brick ceiling, adding a spoonful of chilli sauce as the locals do; the result is delicious and spicy, more of a stew than a soup to eat with the basket of bread that accompanies it. The temperature is zero when I walk back to my room, the snow falling in big soft flakes to settle on the cobblestones and terracotta roofs.
In the morning sky is blue and the snow crystallised against the small crooked window of my attic room. A table has been set for breakfast – not something that is usually included in the price of a room – and they cook me an enormous plate of scrambled eggs with ham and paprika, topping up my coffee cup constantly. The thermometer in the square flickers between zero and minus one as I walk to the station, and as I approach, I hear a familiar but unexpected diesel exhaust note: an M61 is sitting in platform one with a three coach train decorated for the 50th anniversary of the uprising. One of the carriages has been converted into a mobile museum which is touring the country, stopping for a morning or an afternoon at every town and city in Hungary; there is a seating coach and a separate sleeping car for the support crew behind this, and the gleaming M61 at the front. I am surprised to find that it’s not the same engine I rode to Esztergom – I was convinced that was the only survivor – but a beautifully restored model owned and maintained by MAV Technik, Hungarian Railways’ engineering department. This makes me feel slightly less guilty about breaking the door handle off the M61 at the museum. Some modern touches have been added to the engine – an in-cab computer, aluminium identification plates bearing its European wide recognition number, a revised colour scheme – but the wooden window frames, body side portholes, and cast Nohab builder’s plate are all original. A small panel near the cab reads MY Class - 50 Anniversary Tour: Budapest–Odense-Budapest: in 2004 all the surviving locomotives made by this builder were brought together in the Danish city for display, and this one travelled there and back under its own power from Hungary - a feat in itself for a forty year old locomotive – at a cost of 17,000 Euros to the organisers. The engine shuts down and I walk through the museum coach; I am unable to read any of the panels of text, but the photographs of a devastated Budapest and the chattering of small arms fire behind the audio commentary is quite enough to bring the story to life as I follow the uprising from 23rd October to the crushing deployment of 1000 Soviet tanks.
Back on the platform, the M61 is attracting more attention than the museum exhibits: both cabs are crammed with people being given a guided tour of the engine compartment; people climb down onto the track to take photographs or pose in front of the engines distinctive swooping nose, the national flag in a roundel at its centre where once there was a Soviet star. Several people set up video cameras at the trackside to film the M61 as it starts up and takes the travelling museum eastwards out of the station, the vintage locomotive looking and sounding as fresh as if it had just this day rolled out of the Nohab factory in Trondheim.
It is snowing again as I leave the station and walk to the internet café. I email my sister in England and confirm the arrangements for flying back the following evening, then change the last of my Euros into Forints. I divide the notes into separate piles for train and Metro fares to Budapest airport; a large pile for the Panzio room; a smaller pile for food and drinks for the journey. I wash and change and take what’s left to the riverfront bar and sit in a corner with a Borsodi and my notebook. Inside it is as warm and cosy as the sort of snug you would find in an old English pub; outside the night is numb with cold, a low, freezing mist hanging over the river. Tomorrow I will take my last train to Budapest and will sleep in a small Cotswold village. It doesn’t seem possible.