Jan Rezek

Head of Public Transport Terminal
As many passengers as the population of Hradec pass through the public transport terminal in five days.

Getting started in the customer service centre

He has been working for the Hradec Králové Transport Company since 22 April 2009. At that time, Jan Rezko was offered the position of operations technician in the customer centre by his later manager Josef Januš, who, like him, lives in Vlkov near Jaroměř. „At the time of my arrival it was a bit of prehistory in the transport company compared to today, as far as the check-in system is concerned. There were ticket machines in the city, which I operated, and I still delivered paper tickets every day to the many ticket offices that operated in Hradec and the surrounding villages at that time. That's really a minimal job now. Many newsagents don't exist and paper tickets are only sold in small volumes. There was a lot of work involved in introducing the now old ticketing system. Behind the counter at the customer service centre I was responsible for complaints and complaints from people, but also for producing customer cards etc.,“ Jan Rezek recalls his beginnings at the transport company.

Transition to the position of Head of THD

In 2022, the management of the company selected a skilled technician for the position of Head of the Public Transport Terminal and Honza Rezek accepted the challenge. He moved to this position on 1 July 2022.

„When I started here, the terminal had been in operation for 14 years and many things were becoming technologically obsolete. I knew this workplace only briefly, as an operations engineer I came here almost every day. I had 1.5 months to train here, when I still had to hand over my position to my successor. It was hectic, but everything went as it should. Very naively I thought that I would get the terminal in order within a year, everything would be beautifully painted and polished and it would work. However, the daily clash with reality quickly disabused me of my mistake. Some things were not easy and took more time and work than I expected. So I try to take the most important things one step at a time and push them further and further. In July I will have been here for three years and I can see that there are still some things that need to be finalized,“ he commented on the demands of working in his new position.

Helena Rezková

External editor of the magazine Dopravák and author of the book History of public transport in Hradec Králové 1928-2020, 2nd edition)

First contact with the transport company

I first visited the transport company more than 20 years ago, when I was still working in the editorial office of the weekly Radnice at the Hradec Králové City Hall. I used to come here to take photos and make reports, so I got to know the former director Miloslav Kulich and people from the management well. The fact that my son Honza started working here in 2009 was completely beyond me.

A book I'm proud of

After 2010, I was approached by František Meduna, now the former head of the marketing department, to write a book about the history of local public transport. We had known each other professionally for a long time from his former workplace and he knew that I had set up a publishing house in 2009 and started publishing books about the history of Hradec Králové.

It was a big challenge for me at the time - I'm a woman who wasn't really into the subject, nor was I a person passionate about transportation. However, from my former work as a journalist I knew many people who had something to say about the history of Hradec Králové or the history of transport. So I surrounded myself with seven co-authors and started researching. Gradually, I spent a lot of time in archives, in the Hradec Králové museum, in the families of former and current employees of the company, and with Jirka Hladký and Martin Prouza, I searched and sorted through the materials and photos in the cabinets containing the archives of the transport company. In this way, I put together a colourful mosaic of the local history. I negotiated with Láďa Podivín from the transport company in Pardubice to provide materials from his publication on the history of trolleybus transport in Hradec Králové... And if it hadn't been for the Hradec Králové researcher Zdeněk Doubek, who pointed me to this event, the tragic explosion in the garages of the then car depots in 1947 would probably have been forgotten forever. For me personally, it was a big topic to find information about Ervín Nápravník, the first director of the company, who became a great personality of the town and whose activities reached the whole country.

Article continues in magazine Dopravák