Inside Moscow's Metro

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/in-sight/wp/2018/01/19/inside-the-theater-of-moscows-metro/

by ilyagr • 9 years ago

95 47 9 years ago

lokedhs2• 9 years ago

It's hard for pictures to convey just how stunning these stations are, and the fact that the photos in the article were not particularly good didn't help.

I'd recommend anyone to visit and see this for themselves. It doesn't hurt that it also gets you to your destination with amazing accuracy.

It's quite telling that instead of having a sign indicating the arrival time of the next train (in minutes) like all other underground systems I've seen, they have a counter that counts down the seconds until the next train. Also, the counter only has two digits, since it doesn't need more.

snaily• 9 years ago

The only bad thing about the Moscow metro is how loud the trains are entering and leaving the platform. When I was there, I had to cover my ears while admiring the architecture.

geoka92• 9 years ago

Personally I think Stockholm's subway stations are much more spectacular.

lokedhs2• 9 years ago

The Stockholm stations are nice in a different way. That said, I'm from Stockholm, so I might not be the best person to judge.

james_niro• 9 years ago

Picturs cannot make justice you have to see it for yourself. Moscow metro is like you are in a high end art gallery filled with beautiful Russian women. It is different around the year and it can take you anywhere in Moscow.

Checkout the metro map the layout is great

HenryBemis• 9 years ago

As everyone else is writing, it is stunning. One cannot believe the beauty and elegance, the art and technique.

Oh and while there (in Moscow) a must-see for all in the HN is the Museum of Russian Arcade Machines!!

https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g298484-d23423...

mgkimsal4• 9 years ago

Agreed on both counts.

I was there in ... 2011? or 2013? I can't remember which year I visited the arcade museum, but it was fun. They were, while I was there, working on it, as in, some guys in the back were welding some... staircase or wall fixture or something - while I was walking around playing games.

I couldn't read much Russian, and couldn't speak it, but my brother could, and he had a chat with one of the owners of the museum. They were apparently fixing or rebuilding many of the games from whatever parts they could find - apparently it was quite a challenge to find original parts for some of the games.

I remember playing "sniper" and "sniper 2" and "gorodki" - gorodki was pretty fun, and probably would have been a hit in the US with a different name. :)

Momquist• 9 years ago

If you can manage to find the ROMs, Gorodki (actually a remake on TIA-MC1 hardware, released a few years after the original) can be played via MAME since 2016. It also supports several other Soviet arcade games.

http://mamedev.org/?p=429

farnsworthy• 9 years ago

The (centrifugal) layout's cool, too:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/14/Mo...

Or this alternate take:

https://ilyabirman.net/projects/moscow-metro/map/2016/i/diag...

thriftwy2• 9 years ago

I wonder what's up with kerning in the first one. Look how Lokomotiv is rendered, on red x rail ring, top right.

troymc• 9 years ago

Berlin also has a ring metro line [1], but I think it's safe to say that it's not as reliable or as aesthetically stunning as the ones in Moscow. Not that the Berlin metro system is crappy; I've lived here for years and love it.

[1] https://i.pinimg.com/originals/2c/73/f5/2c73f573e6afaf332145...

ivan_gammel2• 9 years ago

It's not a metro line (U-Bahn), actually. It's a railway (S-Bahn), similar to "Moscow Central Ring". Moscow is currently developing it's own equivalent of S-Bahn in addition to the metro.

nirv• 9 years ago

I'm not sure what version of the map is posted in the Wikipedia article, but the official map of the Moscow metro[1] is designed[2] by ArtLebedev's studio and looks much better. Make sure to read "Process" pages.

For those willing to take a chance with Google Translate, I also recommend checking the website Metro[3] by the art director of the mentioned studio.

[1] https://www.artlebedev.com/metro/

[2] https://www.artlebedev.com/metro/map3/

[3] http://metro.ru/

mgkimsal4• 9 years ago

I was there a couple times and was discouraged from taking pictures in the stations. Not knowing the language, I was afraid of the warnings and didn't take too many pics, but ... yeah, the architecture and art is extremely impressive. Unless you live there and use it every day - you probably get to a 'meh' stage at some point. I do remember pretty much no one smiling or expressing much of any emotion, and remember there being just... in my mind, enormous numbers of people. I've been in NYC and London subways, but it felt like Moscow's were just handling far more people (and it felt ... faster too, once I got the hang of reading the maps).

fjsolwmv• 9 years ago

In Russian culture, smiling at a stranger is considered buffoonish behavior.

simongray• 9 years ago

Not just in Russia. I found this article quite enlightening: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/05/culture-...

geoka92• 9 years ago

Not really, people there are just not that happy with each other.

vbezhenar• 9 years ago

People would just think that you're foreigner. Russians don't usually smile without reason, but it's not like they discourage that.

thriftwy2• 9 years ago

People on e.g. BART don't smile. Just google "people on bart".

Interestingly enough, people on Caltrain do.

ivan_gammel2• 9 years ago

This has changed: professional photoshoots still require permission, but otherwise you can make pictures of whatever you want.

konart3• 9 years ago

I was there a couple times and was discouraged from taking pictures in the stations.

This was changed, thakfully. Now we even have stickers on the floor which suggest where you should stand to take best picture.

mgkimsal4• 9 years ago

Thanks. If I ever get back I'll do that.

When I say 'discouraged', it wasn't from any workers or Russian people - it was from my host.

FWIW, this was 2011, and... my host just wasn't all that sure. He defaulted to "permission" vs "forgiveness" mode in a foreign country, which was probably wise.

Overtonwindow• 9 years ago

Is it accurate that North Korea strives to copy the Russians on the beauty of their subway systems? Rather, I suppose, is it an ideological belief to insure public transit is beautiful?

jpatokal2• 9 years ago

If anything, the Pyongyang Metro is even more ideological: AFAIK, it's the only metro in the world where all stations are named after concepts (Comrade, Red Star, Glory, Complete Victory), not nearby places, although there are occasional overlaps (eg. Kaeson/Triumph is near the Arch of Triumph).

http://www.earthnutshell.com/stopping-all-stations-the-pyong...

Broadly speaking, though, virtually all older Communist-era metros were inspired by Moscow and look similar: trains, deep underground platforms, triangle network layouts, revolutionary art, etc. Newer lines are more utilitarian and there is the odd delightful exception, like Prague's weird and wonderful Line A from the 1970s:

https://ubahn.photos/en/portfolio/prague-line-a/ (skip ahead 10 photos or so to get past the newer ones)

MichaelMoser1232• 9 years ago

Broadly speaking, though, virtually all older Communist-era metros were inspired by Moscow and look similar

The subway in East Berlin didn't look like the one in Moscow, in Berlin it was built by the Nazis in the thirties (also Wikipedia says that the trains in the Pyongyang metro came from East Berlin - these are a bit different from the wagons in Moscow https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyongyang_Metro )

mvdwoord• 9 years ago

Those pictures from Prague strongly remind me of some of the metro station architecture in Munich. Some of the stations look like an exact copy, must be because that was also built in the seventies.

aleyan• 9 years ago

I am former resident of Moscow and a current resident of New York. If I could take one thing out of Moscow and bring to NYC it would be the subway. An impossible dream, but what we actually can have though is expanding our NYC subway at a rate anywhere near Moscows. Moscow added 80 stations to its subway since 2000, including 26 stations on a new circular line [0]. New York added 5 in that time [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expansion_timeline_of_the_Mosc...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposed_expansion_of_the_New_...

p2t2p2• 9 years ago

Same here. I've moved to Sydney from Moscow. Boy, do I miss Moscow subway, it works just like teleport. Dive in, dive out in the destination and it's warm in winter and chill in hot summer.

gspetr• 9 years ago

Another former resident of Moscow here.

I traveled through China recently.

Forget Moscow. They got cities which previously had no Subway at all starting out with 20 stations from day one.

bra-ket• 9 years ago

couldn't get through the paywall, but here is another article with amazing pictures: http://www.businessinsider.com/moscows-incredible-metro-syst...

my_first_acct3• 9 years ago

The photographs in the Business Insider article really are worth a look.

konart3• 9 years ago

It's a pity they haven't added any additional info. For example Mayakovskaya Station's arcs were made from special alluminium at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolgoprudnenskoe_Scientific_Pr..., which was created at first for the means of producing the dirigibles.

Also at first rhodonite was used as a material for column fins. Now replaces with marble for the most part.

vadimberman• 9 years ago

The metro, which was named after Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

OK, I'm nitpicking, but it's not exactly true.

The construction was overseen by the ruthless Kaganovich and named after him. When Kaganovich was purged by the successor of Stalin (http://soviethistory.msu.edu/1934-2/the-moscow-metro/), it was changed to "Lenin's".

my_first_acct3• 9 years ago

The St. Petersburg Metro was also named after Lenin. Its full Soviet-era name: the V.I. Lenin Order of Lenin Leningrad Metropoliten [1].

That's a lot of Lenin.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Petersburg_Metro

sologoub• 9 years ago

Was just there on a weekend trip, while on longer trip to EU. (Got to love that in Europe you can just hop on a plane on a whim and be in a completely different country within a couple hours!)

Using the metro really reminded me how much LA is missing in terms of sane public transit. Walked around downtown Moscow, froze near to death (-12C with wind requires some extra cloths that I neglected), got into the first station I saw and only needed one train change to get to the line that took me home. All-in-all less than 20 minutes from randomly picked downtown station to home halfway across the city. Same thing in LA would have required extensive planning and likely multiple bus/train combos, or more likely a call to Uber/Lyft...

Another interesting feature is that Moscow metro has flat rate pricing.

akoster• 9 years ago

I had a similarly pleasant travel experience while visiting Moscow on a whim. It was a bliss to get all around the city and back to where I was staying easily. Trains would come often and would have multiple connections (and if you missed a connection, you could just take one of the circle lines to get to the line you missed. And being from southern California, I definitely agree with your comment about how much more difficult a trip to LA would be without having access to a car.

int_19h• 9 years ago

The biggest advantage is how predictable it is, because of short intervals. There are smartphone apps that compute your ETA from station to station, and even across multiple transfers, I found them very accurate. It's a nice feature when planning commute etc.

p2t2p2• 9 years ago

The gap between trains is about 70 seconds or even less in rush hour.

JBlue42• 9 years ago

It's funny this shows up now because a friend (who works in construction/architecture) and I were kvetching about how slowly we're building out the system in LA (like the 3 mi. Phase 2 of the purple line taking 7 yrs to come online. Metro is making good efforts to build out a system but it's going to take a long time and too often depends on raising sales taxes (which adversely affects poor folks who are then also the ones that tend to take mass transit). Stations are the most expensive parts to build but I personally think it's what we need more of. More stops to service more people with more frequent trains. Ideally, also lines that get away from the hub and spoke model.

Here's an article about digging the tunnels for the Regional Connector:

http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-me-metro-tunneling/

fivre• 9 years ago

What copy editor let "Plochtchad Revolioutsi" and "Plotschad Revolutsyii" through as acceptable transliterations of "Площаь Революции" (and allowed two versions of the same station's name to boot)?

my_first_acct3• 9 years ago

I'm guessing that the author, Didier Bizet, is French. These look like typical (though not very consistent) transliterations of Russian into French (the path by which the composer Чайковский became known as Tchaikovsky, rather than Chaikovskiy). Also, one of the captions mentions a bench from the "Cathedral of Christ-Sauveur". Bien sur?

So maybe the article was translated from French? Anyway, I agree that the copy editor was asleep at the switch.

spatial_dima• 9 years ago

Surprisingly The article doesn’t talk about the efficiency and scale of the system (one of the busiest and fastest in the world), the price (<0,5$ Flat) per ride, WiFi and cellular in the trains, safety, simplicity of navigation (thinking of Tokyo), art-gallery trains and professional musicians playing near the exits.

Overall, I’d say that WP could’ve done a better job here (especially if you ask ppl to pay for this article).

owenversteeg• 9 years ago

Anyone else disappointed by the photos? It's obviously a really gorgeous system, perhaps the most beautiful in the world, but I don't think the pictures do it justice.

Inside Moscow's Metro

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