What's in a Prague street name

Originally published on Twitter on 4 August 2022.

Pernerova was built before 1850.

The street sign says Pernerova is in Karlín – and it mainly is – but its westernmost parts are in Žižkov.

Jan Perner (1815-45) was a designer and builder of railways.

He studied at Prague Technical College from 1831 to 1833.

In 1836, he went to Russia and worked on the construction of the first Russian railway (Petrograd to Tsarskoye Selo and Pavlovsk).

Returning home, he worked on construction of the Břeclav-Brno line in 1839, and then designed the route for the Prague-Vienna line.

By 1842, he was chief engineer of the state railways, and the Emperor approved his proposal for a route from Prague to Dresden. Perner also helped choose the location of Prague’s Main Station.

He died at the tragically early age of thirty when his head hit a pole when he was looking out of the window of a moving train. He was the first person to die in a railway accident in Bohemia.

The square outside the station in Pardubice is named after him, as is the Faculty of Transport at the city’s university.

His name has also been given to several EuroCity trains over the years, including one that left Pardubice for Prague at 06:09 this morning.

Former names of the road were:

• Žižkova (which I doubt needs explaining) from 1839-1940 and again from 1945-7;

• Olmützer Straße (Olomouc Street) from 1940 to 1945; and

• UNRRA (i.e. United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration) from 1947 to 1951.