Children’s Railway
It was a really nice day today, so with one of the last chances for great warm weather we decided to take the Children’s Railway, which is a railroad up in the Buda hills that is ran by children aged 10-14. It is the longest children’s railway in the world and was begun in the 1940’s by the Hungarian Communist Party. This was to show children that work is fun and to get them ready to be hard-working citizens of the communist society.
The train starts in Hűvösvölgy and goes through seven stops before it gets to Széchenyihegy 40 minutes later. This is an open-air train (there are two closed trams though) that runs year-round. There are plastic covers that can be rolled down over the sides in poor weather, but we wanted to ride it during the nice weather.
Willow had fun making cute and sassy faces.
And Ronin was busy drawing a picture of the train while we were on the train. I tried to get him to look around, but he was adamant that he needed to finish his picture.
Here are some of the children working. One walked through the train checking tickets. Whenever we entered or exited a station they had to salute the train.
When we got of the train we had planned to get a snack and play at the playground for an hour until the next train came to take us back to the starting point. However, the ‘playground’ was very small, and I couldn’t imagine the kids being entertained there for a full hour. Instead, we decided to jump right back on the first train and take it back five stops to Szépjuhászné and then do a hike. Here are the kids saluting at the train tracks we crossed when beginning our hike.
The hike took us to two lookout towers. The first looked like stacked boxes, and the stairs switched back and forth up until we got to the top. The top was covered, and was a lovely view of the Buda hills.
On the way to the next lookout tower we passed this small cave with a funny-looking door atop the small hill. The kids wanted to go in and we spent several minutes pondering what kind of treasures could be behind that door.
The second tower was big logs in a spiral shape. This looked really cool, and I was really afraid the kids would fall over the side since there was not a very big handrail. It was windy up here, but the kids like to look again over the hills.
From the second tower we hiked back to the starting point where the yellow tram took us back to Budapest. It was a good afternoon, and I’m glad we got to spend a couple hours as a family in nature.
