MÁVAG company was the second largest industrial enterprise after the Manfréd Weiss Steel and Metal Works in the Hungarian half of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy.

The state founded the Machinery and Wagon Factory of the Hungarian Royal Railways and first handed it over to the management of MÁV, before establishing its own board.

After the Austro-Hungarian compromise of 1867, the legal obstacles of the development of national industry were eliminated, and the export of the locomotives became available.

Corporate (private) railways have grown, which, along with MÁV, demanded a large number of locomotives and wagons.

class (later 335 series) freight train steamer in 1873, which was presented at the Vienna World Exhibition that year.

The company produced a C-axis universal locomotive, the "Szolnok", for the Tiszavidék Vasút (later became the MÁV IIId).

The director of the factory became Nándor Förster in 1890, the year the mill's threshing machine was completed.

The 20th century started with an economic downturn: the factory dropped 100 pieces of steam locomotives annually by 1904, almost half of them were made abroad, mainly in Italy.

At that time, the vehicle parts of the electric locomotives (VM1 and VM4 factory) produced for the Italian railway, Val Tellina, were also prepared for Ganz & Partners.

The factory's bridging class then worked on major orders: they were built in 1898 and handed over to Budapest.

In the 1900s, the Hungarian Royal State Iron Works planned and produced a number of steam locomotives of much larger size and power than before.

The Hungarian Royal State Iron Factories have produced the 1051 Series Mallet system of the 1051 series, which is the largest and most powerful locomotive of the age in Europe until the construction of the MÁV Class 601 Engines were built in the MÁVAG factory in 1914.

By this time, the annual capacity of the factory exceeded 300, but the demand also required the manufacture of some smaller types in other plants.

Due to the war copper deficiency, from 1915 only the Brotan-Deffner-system boilers with steel water pipes were made including the already mentioned 324, 375, 376 and 601 series locomotives.

In 1925, the Budapest and Diósgyőr ironworks were merged with the Győr Ágyúgyár and the company was renamed MÁVAG (Hungarian Royal State Iron, Steel and Machine Works).

The wartime design was completely revised, the boiler dimensions were increased considerably and the axle arrangement was modified.

The vehicle type remained in production for more than three decades, and MÁVAG produced 514 of them, not only for MÁV, but also for several foreign railway companies after the Second World War.

The purchase of the 424,027, the 5000th locomotive of the factory, could only be made after lengthy financial negotiations, in fact for prestige reasons.

In 1928, the "little brothers" of the 424, the so-called "engine replacement" steam locomotives of the 22 series, the 126th series, were born, which in the reduced traffic due to the economic crisis not only carried branch line trains, but also light main line express trains.

In this spirit, and as a competitor to the Ganz factory's "ÁRPÁD" high-speed rail buses, the streamlined steam locomotive series 242, construction number 129, was born.

MÁVAG exported many locomotives: from 1900, to Italy and Romania, later to Egypt, India, Yugoslavia, and Korea.

[2] After MÁG stopped producing passenger cars in 1930, the ageing of the taxi fleet became a growing problem during the 1930s.

The start of taxi production was also helped by a licensing agreement signed in 1937 with the Cologne-based Ford-Werke company on the initiative of István Horthy, the general manager of MÁVAG, under which MÁVAG began assembling the Eifel and V8 models for use as taxis in Hungary around 1938.

Subsequently, the production and domestic assembly of the much cheaper four-cylinder Ford Eifel model began.

During the Second World War, MÁVAG, together with Weiss Manfréd Steel and Metal Works, became the most important military factory in the country.

The aircraft factory, established under István Horthy, started production in 1939, initially producing the WM-21 Sólyom and M-25 Nebuló, then the MÁVAG Héja from 1942 and Arado Ar 96 from 1943.

After the completion of the reparation deliveries, production of the types produced up to that time resumed, now under commercial contracts.

This decision may be considered premature in today's terms, as the development of diesel and electric locomotives was very slow and this caused a serious shortage of traction vehicles at MÁV by the 1960s.

Mainly due to the backwardness of the back-engineering industry, they were built with a constant delay and operated with low reliability.

This type initially caused a lot of headaches and even a loss of prestige for the two factories because of the diesel engines' faults.