The statue of the Golden Train

As well as covering theoretical and practical ways to make payments over the centuries, the Hungarian Money Museum also highlights our country’s wonderful cultural treasures. At the fifth node of the exhibition journey, visitors find a composition that resembles a train locomotive. This work, titled The Rumble, is both an indoor sculpture and a sculpture in an open-air public square. 13 meters long and weighing 13 tons, it begins in the museum and breaks through the walls of the building to burst into Széll Kálmán Square.

The composition, created by sculptor Gábor Miklós Szőke, creates the image of a steam engine in motion. It is made of approximately seven thousand stainless steel rods, each painted gold, then cut, bent, and hand-welded at the edges. The golden bars form a dynamically textured sculpture, and the impression of motion is enhanced by the lighting. Lamps that go on and off in waves give the impression of a train rumbling through a tunnel.

Although Szőke’s other work has tended to focus on supernatural animals and creatures, in this composition he draws attention to the mechanical structure of the machine and the movement created by the harmony of its parts. The gold bars representing the stages of movement can also be seen as a reference to the Italian Futurists of the early twentieth century, who frequently strove to capture and depict dynamism.

This sculpture of a golden train conjures a story of adventure, but in this case, a true story. At the end of the Second World War, employees of the Hungarian National Bank fled the occupying Soviet forces on a train for the West loaded with the bank’s gold reserves. These heroes voluntarily put their lives at risk to prevent the wealth of the country from falling into foreign hands. Thanks to the determined steps taken by the management of the bank, and after lengthy diplomatic negotiations, it was finally possible in 1946, with the assistance of the American army, to return the reserves— more than 30 tons of gold—to Hungary intact. In the fifth node of the exhibition, an animated film and a spectacular tabletop display present the story of the Hungarian National Bank’s gold train. Visitors can trace the stops the train made after its departure in 1944.

As a sculpture which conjures the image of a locomotive train, The Rumble alludes to more than just the story of the Gold Train. It also expresses the clatter and motion of the mechanisms of the economy and the ever-present push for progress. When composing the work, Gábor Miklós Szőke was seeking a universal symbol of development and forward movement, and he wanted something that would capture these abstract concepts in a single recognizable image. In The Rumble, the locomotive, which has been emblematic of progress and development in all the arts since the industrial revolution, becomes a metaphor for the engine of the economy.