
Inside Moscow's Metro - ilyagr
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/in-sight/wp/2018/01/19/inside-the-theater-of-moscows-metro/
======
aleyan
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...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expansion_timeline_of_the_Moscow_Metro)

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposed_expansion_of_the_New_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposed_expansion_of_the_New_York_City_Subway#21st-
century_expansion)

~~~
p2t2p
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.

------
sologoub
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
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
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.

------
lokedhs
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.

~~~
geoka9
Personally I think Stockholm's subway stations are much more spectacular.

~~~
lokedhs
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.

------
vadimberman
> 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/](http://soviethistory.msu.edu/1934-2/the-moscow-metro/)), it was
changed to "Lenin's".

~~~
my_first_acct
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Petersburg_Metro)

------
farnsworthy
The (centrifugal) layout's cool, too:

[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/14/Mo...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/14/Moscow_metro_ring_railway_map_en_sb_future.svg/1000px-
Moscow_metro_ring_railway_map_en_sb_future.svg.png)

Or this alternate take:

[https://ilyabirman.net/projects/moscow-
metro/map/2016/i/diag...](https://ilyabirman.net/projects/moscow-
metro/map/2016/i/diagram@fx.png?1490271378)

~~~
troymc
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...](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/2c/73/f5/2c73f573e6afaf332145bb6af550ffaf.jpg)

~~~
ivan_gammel
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.

------
HenryBemis
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...](https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g298484-d2342320-Reviews-
Museum_of_Soviet_Arcade_Machines-Moscow_Central_Russia.html)

~~~
mgkimsal
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
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](http://mamedev.org/?p=429)

~~~
mgkimsal
Cool - thanks!

------
james_niro
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.

PS

Checkout the metro map the layout is great

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

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

------
fivre
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_acct
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.

------
owenversteeg
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.

------
Overtonwindow
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?

~~~
jpatokal
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...](http://www.earthnutshell.com/stopping-all-stations-the-pyongyang-
metro/)

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

~~~
MichaelMoser123
>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](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyongyang_Metro)
)

~~~
jpatokal
The subway in East Berlin was formerly (and is now again) part of the Berlin
U-Bahn, which predates Moscow's metro by a good 30 years. So while in a
Communist country, it's not really a Communist- _era_ metro.

~~~
MichaelMoser123
not exactly 30 years, the first section of the U-Bahn opened in 1923 and the
first section of the Moscow metro opened in 1935

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_U-
Bahn](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_U-Bahn)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_Metro](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_Metro)

------
spatial_dima
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).

------
bra-ket
couldn't get through the paywall, but here is another article with amazing
pictures: [http://www.businessinsider.com/moscows-incredible-metro-
syst...](http://www.businessinsider.com/moscows-incredible-metro-system-
photos-empty-2015-10)

~~~
konart
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...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolgoprudnenskoe_Scientific_Production_Plant),
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.

