From toad to hydrogen. A history of public transport in Poland

On the morning of 11 December 1866 a red car drawn by a pair of horses pulled out of the depot at Inżynierska 6 in Warsaw’s Praga district. It rolled onto Targowa Street, turned towards the Vistula, crossed the new Kierbedź Bridge, climbed the Nowy Zjazd (where extra horses were hitched on), passed the Royal Castle and, by way of Krakowskie Przedmieście, Królewska and Marszałkowska, arrived outside Vienna Station (Dworzec Wiedeński). Seven point six kilometres, four passing loops, a fare of 15 kopecks. Varsovians took a good look at the cars, slow and ungainly, and named them ropuchy: toads.

That is how rail transport began in Polish cities. A hundred and sixty years later the same streets carry trams from Bydgoszcz and Korea, with hundred-metre metro trains running beneath them; the buses run on electricity or on hydrogen.

IBefore the rails were laid

Before the tram there was the omnibus: a covered, horse-drawn coach for a dozen or so people, rattling over the cobbles. Historians of Warsaw transport date the first omnibuses to the 1820s, although at first they carried guests to celebrations and on Sunday outings. A regular suburban route from Saxon Square to Królikarnia began in 1836, and the first city route in 1844: Piotr Steinkeller’s ‘sztajnkellerka’ ran between the Mostowski Palace and Vienna Station. In Kraków omnibuses appeared in 1875 and for seven years were the city’s only public transport.

The omnibus had a bad press: it shook you about, it was expensive and it would not set off until it had a full load. When the ‘horse-drawn iron road’ began running in Praga in 1866, the newspapers called it the iron omnibus, because it ran on rails rather than cobbles.

IIA horse on rails

Warsaw’s 1866 line was not built for passengers. The 86-year concession, running to 1952, went to the Main Society of Russian Railways, which wanted to move goods between Vienna Station and the Praga stations, St Petersburg and Terespol. The main cargo was to be coal, and cotton for the factories of Łódź; goods wagons were to run at night. People were an afterthought. A single car got through about ten horses a day, because an animal could only work for four to five hours. In 1869 the toads carried 378,000 passengers.

A proper city network was not built until the Belgians arrived. On 18 October 1881, at 1pm, the Belgian company’s first car left the depot at Sierakowska 7 in Muranów. Two years later the network had 21.5 kilometres of track, 80 cars, 384 horses and 250 staff. Its eleven lines had no numbers, only colours, because more than half of Varsovians could not read. Bolesław Prus wrote in the ‘Kurier Warszawski’ that trams were among the finest inventions of the century.

Meanwhile, horses were taking to the rails in other cities, in three different states. In Gdańsk, then Prussian, the horse tram started in 1873. In Wrocław, on 10 July 1877. In Poznań in 1880, two building contractors, Otto Reymer and Otto Mascha, set up a line from the station to the Old Market Square. In that same year, 1880, the Trieste Company’s horse tram began running in Austrian Lwów. Kraków got its own in 1882, on narrow gauge, because the streets of the old town had no room for standard-gauge track. Bydgoszcz joined in 1888. Only Łódź skipped the horses: it was waiting for electricity.

‘we would find it hard even to imagine Warsaw without trams’ (Warsaw press, 1892, as cited in a Museum of Warsaw study)

IIIA spark

The electric tram is a German invention: Werner Siemens demonstrated the first one in 1881, near Berlin. Of the cities in today’s Poland, Wrocław was the first to take it up. On 14 June 1893 a private company, Elektrische Straßenbahn Breslau, launched white and green cars running from the cemeteries in Grabiszyn through the centre to Rakowiec. The ‘Breslauer Zeitung’ reported that passengers ‘positively stormed the cars’, and the police had to help the conductors.

A year later a Siemens & Halske electric tram set off in Lwów, built for the General National Exhibition. Bydgoszcz and Gdańsk electrified their networks in 1896, Poznań in 1898. On 23 December 1898 an electric set left the depot of the Łódź Electric Railway (Kolej Elektryczna Łódzka) and ran down Piotrkowska Street to Helenów, and then on to Paradyż. Łódź never had horse trams; it was the first city in the Kingdom of Poland where the tram ran on electricity from day one. Kraków electrified its narrow-gauge tracks in 1901.

Warsaw, the largest city, came last. Not until 26 March 1908, at 9.35am, did the first electric line start running: from Krasiński Square along Miodowa, Krakowskie Przedmieście, Królewska and Marszałkowska to Unii Lubelskiej Square. Horses survived in the city until 1916, on a short stretch from Młynarska Street out to Wola, and they made one more comeback: on 13 April 1917 a boiler exploded at the tram power station on Przyokopowa Street, and for six weeks Warsaw was once again carried by horse trams. In 1918 the division of cars into first and second class was abolished.

IVThe interwar years: engine and wire

Independent Poland inherited networks from the three partitions, and three track gauges with them. The novelty of the 1920s was the bus. Warsaw’s first, Saurers and Benzes bought in Austria and Germany, arrived in 1920 and were promptly requisitioned by the army for the Battle of Warsaw. After that they served the suburbs. In Poznań the first municipal bus went into service in 1925; in Kraków regular routes started in 1927. The scale was modest: in 1928 Warsaw had 14 French Somua buses, Paris more than a thousand. In the capital, trams carried 90 per cent of passengers and buses 10. By the end of the interwar period the capital’s fleet numbered 128 vehicles: Somuas, Mercedes and Chevrolets assembled in Poland under American licence.

In 1930, five years after its first bus, Poznań launched Poland’s first trolleybus. A vehicle with no rails but a wire overhead, it was cheaper than a tram and quieter than a bus. Trolleybuses would return to Polish cities after the war: to Warsaw in 1946, and to Gdynia and Lublin for good.

VWar

Warsaw’s trams stopped on 17 September 1939 and came back in November. In 1941 the occupiers repainted them yellow and red, reserved the front platforms ‘nur für Deutsche’, for Germans only, and from April 1942 ran line ‘0’ exclusively for Germans. A ticket that had cost 5 groszy in autumn 1939 cost 40 in 1942. In summer 1942 there were 660 cars running in the city; by July 1944, 119 were left. On 1 August 1944 services were suspended, and the cars went into the barricades of the Warsaw Uprising.

The first post-war tram ran in Praga on 20 June 1945; the left bank had to wait for its own until 15 September. In post-war Wrocław, overloaded trams were known as ‘bunches of grapes’, because people hung off them like grapes on the vine. In 1949, between spring and December, residents, councillors, conductors and drivers built the eight-kilometre line to Leśnica there with their own hands.

VIPeople’s Poland: the N, the sausage, the cucumber and the Ikarus

Reconstruction needed one simple tram. It turned out to be the Konstal type N from Chorzów: boxy, two-axle, with wooden benches, built from the late 1940s for every city in the country. Kraków got its first ‘enki’ (from the letter N) in 1949. In autumn 1959 the first car of a different generation arrived in Warsaw: the Konstal 13N, modelled on the Czech Tatra T1 and, through it, on the American PCC design of the 1930s. Its rounded body and noisy gearbox earned it the nickname parówka, ‘the sausage’. More than 840 of them were built for Warsaw. In 1969 Kraków got the first articulated 102Ns, and in the mid-1970s the 105N arrived in the cities, the boxy successor to the sausage, which in its 105Na version became the most numerous tram in Polish history and is still running today.

On streets without rails, the ogórek, ‘the cucumber’, ruled: the Czech Škoda 706 RTO and, from 1959, its licence-built version, the Jelcz 043. A high floor, the engine under a bonnet at the front, the rounded lines that gave it its name, and the smell of exhaust inside. In 1972 Jelcz bought a licence from the French firm Berliet for a rear-engined bus; the first PR110s left the factory in 1975. They had air suspension and rode comfortably, but coped badly with Polish road surfaces. In 1978 the first articulated Ikarus 280s from Hungary appeared on route 192 in Ursynów. In the winter of the century, 1978/79, they started when the Berliets would not, and that settled their career. They leaked, the windows in the rear section froze over, but they ran. In 1977 Warsaw’s Municipal Transport Company (Miejskie Zakłady Komunikacyjne, MZK) had almost 2,200 vehicles.

In those same years the man who had ridden with the passengers since 1866 disappeared from the cars. On 1 January 1964 Warsaw began fitting ticket validators, and on 19 May 1965 conductorless operation was introduced. From then on, the passenger punched the ticket and the inspector checked it. The word kanar, slang for a ticket inspector and already familiar in pre-war Warsaw, probably spread across the whole of Poland at this point.

Warsaw had been planning a metro since 1925, when the city resolved to have a design drawn up for an underground railway. From 1950 to 1953 a deep-level metro on the Moscow model was dug, and in 1957 work was halted. It resumed in 1983. After twelve years of construction, a train carrying passengers set off on 7 April 1995, on an eleven-kilometre stretch from Kabaty to Politechnika.

VIIAfter 1989: low floor, card, app

After 1989 cities separated the organiser from the operator: in Warsaw the Public Transport Authority (Zarząd Transportu Miejskiego) was set up on 1 September 1992, and in 1994 MZK was split into Tramwaje Warszawskie (Warsaw Trams) and Miejskie Zakłady Autobusowe (the Municipal Bus Company). Kraków bought its first low-floor bus in 1994, and its first low-floor trams in 1999. For a passenger with a pushchair or a walking stick, a low floor meant being able to get on without help.

In Bolechowo near Poznań, Solaris grew out of the Neoplan factory; since the turn of the century its Urbino has been the most common bus at Polish stops and an export to the whole of Europe. In Bydgoszcz, Pesa built a tram. On 29 May 2009 Tramwaje Warszawskie signed a ‘contract of the century’ with the company for 186 low-floor 120Na Swing cars; the first arrived on 19 May 2010. On 31 December 2012, after more than fifty years, the last sausages left Warsaw’s tracks. Wrocław brought in Škoda 16Ts from Plzeň, Kraków Bombardiers, then Stadlers from Siedlce. The metro reached Młociny in 2008, and in 2015 the central section of the second line opened, under the Vistula.

The ticket changed too. The little paper card punched in the validator gave way to the city card, and then to the phone. Operators began publishing the timetables that once hung in glass cases at stops in the open GTFS format. Out of that data grew journey planners and apps that show where the bus is right now.

VIIIThe return of the tram, and a bus that drips water

On 19 December 2015 at 12.30pm a tram set off in Olsztyn. The city had had trams until 1965 and scrapped them, as so many others did. Half a century later it built a network from scratch: 11 kilometres, 20 stops, 15 bidirectional Solaris Tramino trams, the widest in Poland. It was the country’s first new tram network since 1959; Olsztyn became the fifteenth Polish city with trams.

Meanwhile, the bus stopped smoking. Kraków tested its first electric bus in 2013, and in 2014 launched Poland’s first route run by electric buses. In 2020 Warsaw announced it would grow its electric fleet from 30 to 160 vehicles, which, according to MZA, put it third in Europe. In 2022 hydrogen buses went into service in Kraków; nothing but water drips from their exhaust pipes. Since 2021 Warsaw has been taking delivery of Korean Hyundai 140N trams, and in 2024 it opened new routes along Kasprzaka Street and out to Wilanów.

From the toad on Inżynierska Street to hydrogen on route 128: a hundred and sixty years. We still travel together, strangers next to strangers, and someone still checks the tickets. Gdzie Jest Kanar (‘Where’s the kanar?’) is here to make that shared journey a little easier. The ticket, as ever, stays in your own pocket.

Bibliography

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