Győr Station Lives in the 50s

The Cent­ral Station in Vienna is new and fancy and glossy, as are the Austri­an and Czech trains that pass through. I don’t think there’s hardly any shit trains left in Austria these days.

Plenty of Hungari­an ones though! This was my decrep­it old train- the inter­city express from Vienna to Budapest (stop­ping at Győr). It had compart­ments with slid­ing doors still.

Győr station is really quite styl­ish in a 1950s way. I took most of these photos while I was wait­ing around bored for my delayed train back to Austria.  All the bases covered here. Hungari­an land­scapes, dinner, and tract­ors.

Memori­al to the people who were depor­ted from this station to concen­tra­tion camps. Hungary had their own home-grown Franco style dictat­or, Admir­al Hort­hy. Hungary being situ­ated between Germany and the USSR, he had to pick an alli­ance, and chose Hitler. Despite being extremely anti-Semit­ic, Hort­hy drew the line at send­ing people to the camps and was stalling for time. When Hitler got word in the summer of 1944 that Hort­hy was trying to arrange a peace deal with Stal­in and de-escal­ate the war, he invaded and installed the local ultra-fascist nuts, the Arrow Cross party in power, and with­in a month a huge amount of people were shipped to Auschwitz. More info here.

Disco payphone.

“Let’s travel with Hungari­an Rail!”

About 50 years of solid­i­fied poster glue glop.

I bought this slice of cheese­cake from the fancy bakery to take on the train. Hungary is very big on cheese­cake. This was the weekly special flavour, chest­nut. I regret­ted getting it. I like chest­nut things, and I like cheese­cake, but they were not a good combo.

Here’s Fertőszent­miklós where I had to wait 2 hours due to miss­ing my connec­tion. Thrill­ing huh?

It’s all go in Fertőszent­miklós.

I think this flower­bed was meant to be a map of Hungary…

Where am I going again?

This is the border between Hungary and Austria. Until 1989 it was heav­ily milit­ar­ised, and still required you to go through a check­point until 2005. I saw an aban­doned Check­point Charlie type place from the train window.