Close Finish for Budapest at World Tramdriver Championship

Reigning European Champion, Budapest Competed for the World Title and came in fourth place. Congratulations!

On 13 September 2025 Vienna’s Rathausplatz hosted the inaugural TRAM-WM — the World Tramdriver Championship, a one-day spectacle that expanded the existing European Tramdriver (TRAM-EM) contests into a global event with 25 city teams from five continents. The event combined precision driving disciplines (stop-and-go, target braking, precision reversing, “tram bowling” and similar show-style challenges) with a festival atmosphere for the public. 

The host city, Vienna (Wiener Linien), won the team title on its home course; Poznań (Poland) took silver and Oslo (Norway) bronze. The reigning European Champions, Budapest (BKV) finished fourth place overall among the 25 teams. 

The 2024 European Champions, Krisztina Schneider and Ákos Bodnár from Budapest

Budapest’s squad was the reigning European champion pairing — Krisztina Schneider and Ákos Bodnár — who had won the 2024 European title in Frankfurt and therefore arrived in Vienna as one of the favourites. At the Tram-WM they again posted top-tier performances across the eight tasks, but a combination of tiny penalties and the extremely high scores posted by the home team and Poznań left Budapest just outside the podium in fourth place. 

Individual results published by the Tram-EM Facebook page report Ákos Bodnár finishing seventh in the individual rankings. The World Championship format awards points for performance in each of eight disciplines and also factors time; small slips (a missed exact stop, a spilled water container in Stop & Go, or a slightly off-target braking) can cost many points. Vienna’s team produced near-perfect runs in several judged disciplines on their home layout and benefited from the organisers’ course familiarity; Poznań and Oslo also posted consistently high totals.

A short history of the sport and the championship series

If you want to get a feel for the event we highly suggest you watch The Tim Traveller's excellent coverage of last year's competition where Budapest came home with the gold medal!

The Tramdriver Championship concept began in Europe as TRAM-EM (Tram European Championship) in 2012 (first held in Dresden) and thereafter toured European cities (Vienna hosted a Tram-EM in 2015 and Wiener Linien won in Oradea in 2023). After more than a decade as a European contest, organisers expanded the event into a World Championship in 2025, deliberately inviting teams from outside Europe (cities from Australia, Brazil, Hong Kong, Morocco, the US and elsewhere took part in Vienna). The TRAM-EM/TRAM-WM format is explicitly designed around two-person teams, multiple judged disciplines and an emphasis on precision rather than outright speed. 

If you are interested, here are the final team results for the event: