[atleta]

I'm not aware of any actual mafia. They were almost certainly metaphorical and they must have been just bashing the local government. Because what they do is really a shame. One of the lines is de facto in a life threatening condition. Trains caught fire multiple times. Instead of being replaced, the 40 year old cars are being refurbished/modernized. This has something to do with the EU (they gave money for this, but not that). There was a tender, but miraculously it was the Russians who won it, despite their offer was quite a lot more expensive than that of the Estonians. And of course, as it happens with corruption, they failed to deliver a properly working version, so after a few weeks of testing, the first few trains were sent back.

About the security (or rather the extremely low quality) of the eTicket system: that was developed by a 3rd party that belongs to the Deutsche Telekom group, and that company is indeed quite a high profile system integrator working with a lot of large companies, banks, etc. So it's a bit of surprising (even if corruption is involved) that they released it in this form. Actually I'm surprised by these bugs even for a prototype that was forcefully pushed out of the door, because you just never do these things in the first place.

[inferiorhuman]

> Instead of being replaced, the 40 year old cars are being refurbished/modernized.

Age seems like a bit of a red herring to me. Here in San Francisco BART cars are about that old, Muni runs 90 year old Italian trams and American ones that are close to 70 years old. And, of course, the cable cars. BART bears about the worst of it because many parts are no longer available.

[atleta]

Interesting point. Don't forget that this is 40-50 year old Soviet technology :). And cars are actually in pretty bad shape, well over their planned lifetime of 30 years (AFAIK). Full of rust, sometimes catch fire. The drive system is also problematic, because it doesn't have regenerative breaking so the cars heat the tunnels quite a lot which is pretty bad during the summer.

They are in such a bad shape and/or hard to rebuild that not much remains of the original during the refurbishment.

[kodfodrasz]

Actually the Russian company and the tender has received attacks that the cars are actually new, only some identifiers have been transferred from the old cars, as Metrowagonmash had a dozen or so surplus cars of the type the used cars were supposed to be upgraded to.

[kodfodrasz]

Actually yes, the EU some money for refurb, not new trains.

The Russians didn't magically win the tender, i think it was realpolitik. They manufactured them originally in the first place, they have the means to do the work, and without knowing if the proposals were technically equivalent, Hungary needs to maintain a good relation not only to its neighbors, and fellow EU members, but to Moscow.

Also the trains are not in a worse working condition than the Siemens Combino trams or the Siemens and Alstom technology at Metro 4 line, which also had integration problems during the first months of operation. The problems will be addressed by the russian firm as well as as the western firms addressed those problems.

[atleta]

Well, only if you want to explain away the fact that the Estonians should have won the tender based on the official scoring and criteria. In other words, you are rationalizing. There's a reason why tenders always have a fixed scoring system. And this is it.

Maintaining good relationships with the Russians wasn't part of it, of course. We'll pay them enough for Pask2 (awarded without tendering). But even if not, because enough does not exist, more is always better, if this is the price of a 'good relationship' then we already have a bad relationship with them. I.e. they are blackmailing us. (Of course, it's not the case, but they are probably more willing to pay back than the Estonians...)

No, these problems are not like other problems, though Siemens and Alstrom were also both involved in corruption cases (I mean outside of Hungary), these are more serious and didn't happen with the others. It's not simply only integration problems.

[posterboy]

Nothing like the cars build for berlin that were slightly too big for the narrowest part of the tunnels.