That was then, this is now, Budapest edition

Trains between the two cities [Budapest and Vienna] were fast — four and a quarter hours in 1896.  In 2022 it was three hours and thirty-five minutes.

And:

Budapest finance caught up and surpassed the growth of agricultural and industrial production.  By 1900 Budapest became the bankming centre of Central and Eastern Europe.  Between 1867, the date of the ‘Compromise’ which created the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary, and 1914 the number of Hungarian banks grew from eleven to 160 and their capitalization increased fivefold.  A few of them — the First Hungarian Commercial Bank and the Hungarian Credit Bank — rivalled the biggest Viennese and German banks in size and prestige, as their palatial headquarter buildings in downtown Budapest, designed by the most renowned European and Hungarian architects, showed.  Their owners, such as the Wolianders, the Wahrmanns, Hatvany-Deutsch and Chorins, joined the European super-rich.

That is all from Victor Sebestyen’s interesting new book, Budapest: Portrait of a City Between East and West.