Despite the fact that the first metro will soon be 160 years old, neither experts nor numerous admirers can give an exact definition of this type of transport. Everyone agrees that the metro is an off-street transport, although it is usually tied in one way or another to the already existing system of ground communications. Likewise, you can question any of the definitions that describe the metro. “Underground transport”? In a number of cities, the surface part of the metro is much longer than the underground one. "Electric"? But then the history of the metro should not be calculated from the start of the "locomotive" metro in 1863. The only indisputable definitions are “urban” and “rail”.
However, despite differences in wording, subway trains carry hundreds of millions of people every day in cities around the world. The distinctive Metropolitan (the word “pulled out of the French combination“ metropolitan railway ”) is considered an integral attribute of a large city. The Paris metro is considered the most convenient in terms of movement around the city. Stockholm metro has very few stations very nicely decorated. The North Korean capital Pyongyang opened its deep (many stations are located at a depth of more than 100m) for foreigners only a few years ago. The most modern metro in the world operates in Munich, Germany.
Russia is also a member of this elite club. The Moscow Metro is one of the largest, internationally recognized landmarks of the Russian capital. The metro of St. Petersburg is considered the deepest in terms of the average distance of stations from sea level.
1. Describing the need to build a subway in Moscow, you can cite a lot of citations from the literature. Literary heroes jumped on the tram step not out of a desire for grace - it was impossible to get on the tram. There was a terrible crush inside, pickpockets were operating, quarrels and fights arose. But numbers are much more eloquent than a writer’s pen. In 1935, Moscow trams carried more than 2 billion registered passengers. This figure includes only those who bought a ticket from a conductor or used a pass. To this figure, you can safely add at least a quarter - and there were enough "birds with one stone", and sometimes the conductors could not physically fly around all the passengers. So the modern Moscow metro, with its 237 stations and fast spacious trains, has transported the same 2.5 billion passengers a year on average over the past 15 years, with slight deviations in one direction or another.
2. The first plans to lay at least part of the tram lines in the center of Moscow underground appeared at the end of the 19th century. The solution suggested itself both from the current situation with transport in the city, and from international experience. The main problem was the lack of a central railway station in Moscow. Trains came to dead-end stations. To make a transfer, passengers had to move to another station by tram or cab. This did not add speed and comfort to urban transportation. In Berlin, the city authorities faced a similar problem. In the early 1870s, it was resolved by connecting the stations with direct tram lines. In Moscow, the idea to rid the city of transit in this way matured only by 1897. Then two projects appeared at once. The Ryazan-Ural Railway Society proposed building a double-track railway in Moscow, which would include an underground diametrical section passing through the center. A similar project, but with radial lines, was proposed separately from each other by engineers A. Antonovich and E. Nolteyn. The word “metro” in relation to the underground electric railway was first used in 1901 by K. Trubnikov and K. Gutsevich. Their project along the route roughly repeated the Circle Line, built in the post-war years. However, all projects were rejected. The most significant was the voice of the church. In 1903, Metropolitan Sergius of Moscow wrote that deepening underground is a humiliation of man and a sinful dream.
3. Veniamin Makovsky played a huge role in the construction of the Moscow metro. The 27-year-old engineer, who did not possess any regalia, in 1932 boldly spoke out alone against almost all the engineers and scientists who worked on the design of the Moscow metro. Makovsky proposed building a deep underground metro, while old school specialists and foreigners discussed only two similar methods: surface construction of lines in trenches and shallow lines. Both methods guaranteed to plunge Moscow into a traffic collapse - it was necessary to dig up the most important transport arteries. Meanwhile, on January 6, 1931, Moscow and without blocking traffic stood tight - because of traffic jams, trams could not get on the line, buses and taxis did not work. But even this example did not lower the venerable specialists from the heights of theory to the sinful earth. Makovsky made his way to the first secretary of the city committee of the CPSU (b) Lazar Kaganovich. He supported the young engineer, but this did not make any impression on the specialists. Makovsky published an article in Pravda - in vain. Only JV Stalin's personal instruction to concentrate on the deep-rooted project shifted the matter. Makovsky's triumph? No matter how it is. Veniamin Lvovich was a modest man, and he was quickly pushed into the crowd. Having earned two orders during the years of the first five-year plan, he, despite the generous rain of awards that fell on the metro builders, did not receive a single order or medal until the end of his life. For the improvement of shield tunneling, he received the Stalin Prize, but the second degree and only in 1947.
4. Metro is an expensive pleasure. At the same time, the main costs are practically invisible to the passenger - the train is rushing through the tunnel, on the walls of which you can only see bundles of cables. The costs of decorating stations are clearer. The luxurious stations of the first stages of the Moscow metro evoked mixed feelings among Muscovites. In the reports of the NKVD, there was talk about the people huddling in communal apartments and basements, there are not enough schools and kindergartens, and here that kind of money was thrown into the finishing of stations. Indeed, the decoration of the stations was quite expensive - by the 1930s the leading artists and architects of the USSR had already learned the taste of good fees, and marble, granite and gilding were never among the cheap finishing materials. Nevertheless, the cost of finishing stations and lobbies, according to the maximum estimate, amounted to 6% of all costs for the construction of the first stage of the metro. Further, this figure became even less due to the development of production processes and advanced training of workers.
5. Plans to build an underground railway in St. Petersburg appeared earlier than in Moscow. The capital status of the city in the Russian Empire, the complexity of logistics in the city with a large number of rivers and canals, and the general “westernness” of Northern Palmyra also influenced. In St. Petersburg there were more foreigners with broader views on transport, and Russian educated people. Already at the beginning of the 19th century, Emperor Alexander I received several proposals to build a city railway in the capital. Projects appeared regularly, but most of them did not have elementary engineering work. The authors relied more on the fact that London and Paris already have a metro, and St. Petersburg should not lag behind. Then revolutions unfolded, the capital moved to Moscow. The idea to build a metro in now Leningrad was returned only in 1940, a little over a year before the start of the Great Patriotic War and the blockade. The design and construction were resumed only in 1947, and on November 15, 1955, the first stage of the Leningrad metro started operating as a regular service.
6. Like any other large gathering of people, the underground is an attractive target for terrorists. In the event of a terrorist attack, both the isolation of the metro from the surface of the earth and the difficulties faced by doctors and rescuers when providing first aid to victims work for the attackers. Between 1883 and 1976, the only target of terrorist attacks was the London Underground. It is estimated that over the years in terrorist attacks (there were 10 of them) 7 people died and about 150 were injured, and most of the wounded were injured in stampedes. In 1977, explosions organized by Armenian nationalists killed 7 people in the Moscow metro and injured 37 more. But 1994 became the borderline. Two explosions in the subway of the Azerbaijani capital Baku brought a bloody harvest of 27 dead and about 100 wounded. Since then, unfortunately, subway attacks have become commonplace. Either the bloodiest of them are remembered, or unusual, like the terrorist attack in the Tokyo subway using the poisonous gas sarin. In 1995, spraying sarin through the ventilation system of the metro in the Japanese capital killed 13 and poisoned more than 6,000 people.
7. Metro passengers are not only threatened by terrorist attacks. Equipment wear, insufficient qualifications or confusion of personnel, and just panic can lead to a tragic accident. In 1996, almost 300 people died in a fire in the Baku metro. Most of them were poisoned by carbon monoxide and other combustion products. The driver discovered a fire on the stretch between the two stations and did not think of anything better than stopping the train in a narrow tunnel. The thrust fanned the fire, the inner lining of the cars caught fire. People began to leave the cars in panic through the windows, grabbing the power cables running along the walls, which also led to the death of several people. In the Moscow metro, the largest catastrophe occurred in 2014 when workers fixed the arrow with a 3 mm wire. She could not bear the load, and the front carriages of the train crashed into the wall at full speed. 24 people were killed. In London in 1987, a fire caused by a cigarette butt thrown in a carriage killed 31 people. Passengers of the Paris metro also died because of the cigarette butt. In 1903, the last car of the train caught fire on the stretch between the stations. It was unhooked, but due to communication problems and panic of the station employees, the driver of the next train crashed into a smoky uncoupled carriage. As a result of the double incident, 84 people died.
8. The first three places in the ranking of the owners of the longest subways in the world are occupied by the Chinese cities of Beijing (691 km), Shanghai (676 km) and Guangzhou (475 km). The Moscow metro ranks fifth, with a length of 397 km slightly behind the London metro. Judging by the pace of development of the Moscow metro in recent years, London will soon be left behind. Petersburg metro ranks 40th in the world in terms of line length. The shortest metro in the world operates in Lausanne, Switzerland (4.1 km). The five shortest metro stations also include Gujarat (India), Maracaibo (Venezuela), Dnipro (Ukraine) and Genoa (Italy).
9. In terms of the number of stations, the undisputed leader is the New York subway - 472 stops. 2nd - 3rd places are occupied by the Shanghai and Beijing subways, ahead of Paris and Seoul. The Moscow metro is in 11th place with 232 stations. The St. Petersburg Metro takes 55th position with 72 stations. The Los Tekes metro in the Venezuelan capital Caracas consists of only 5 stations, the metros in Gujarat, Maracaibo and the Dnieper have only one more station.
10. All five of the oldest metros in the world began operations in the 19th century. The world's first underground railway started operating in London in 1863. Of course, there was no talk of any electricity - trains were pulled by steam locomotives. For nearly 30 years “The Tube”, as the English call it, remained the only such road in the world. It was only in 1892 that the metro opened in Chicago (USA), followed by the subways in Glasgow (UK), Budapest (Hungary) and Boston USA).
11. The Moscow and Petersburg metro are developing in almost opposite directions. While new stations are put into operation in the Moscow metro every year, and the metro network is constantly being improved, in St. Petersburg, development is practically frozen. Two new stations - Novokrestovskaya and Begovaya - were opened in 2018. Their opening was timed to coincide with the FIFA World Cup, and the funding came from a federal targeted program. In 2019, the Shushary station was opened, which was going to open in 2017. For the development of the metro, St. Petersburg does not have enough financial resources. An attempt to finance the construction of new lines and stations according to the Moscow scheme - the metro is engaged in the transportation of passengers, and the city government at its own expense expands the network - failed due to a lack of resources in the local budget. Therefore, now the St. Petersburg authorities speak very carefully about the development of the metro. Dozens of new stations will open in Moscow in the coming years.
12. Besides Moscow and St. Petersburg, the metro in Russia operates in 5 other cities: Nizhny Novgorod, Novosibirsk, Samara, Yekaterinburg and Kazan. All these subways, in fact, are a reflection of the bulk of the Soviet plans, so the results of the work of the subways may be surprising. For example, the Novosibirsk metro, consisting of 2 lines with 13 stations, carries three times more passengers per year than the Nizhegorodskoye metro (2 lines, 15 stations). Approximately the same as in Nizhny Novgorod, the passenger traffic (about 30 million people a year) is served by the Kazan metro (line 1, 11 stations). And in the second only Kazan station, Samara, only 14 million people use metro services.
13. In the New York subway, trains run on the same principle as ground transport moves in Russian cities. That is, in order to leave in the right direction, it is not enough for you to know the metro line and the direction of movement (“from the center” or “to the center”). A train heading in the right direction can turn off and go the other way. Therefore, the passenger must also know the route number, often with a letter addition, and make sure that the arriving train is not an express train. If in Moscow a traveler on the Arbatsko-Pokrovskaya line is at the Mitino station and takes a train heading towards the center, he can be sure that he will reach the Semyonovskaya station of the same line. In New York, however, such a passenger, relying on the scheme, runs the risk of driving in the wrong place.
14. In its history, the Moscow metro did not work only on October 16, 1941. On this day, panic began in Moscow, caused by another breakthrough of German troops. In the leadership of the metro, it was aggravated by the order of the People's Commissar of Railways Lazar Kaganovich, which came the day before, to prepare the metro for destruction, and the trains for evacuation. The middle managers simply fled. It was possible to restore order in a day, the trains started after lunch on October 17. The metro, as expected, worked as a bomb shelter. The procedure was worked out: at the signal "Air raid" the contact rails were disconnected, the tracks were blocked with wooden shields, turning into flooring. The war also found victims in the metro - an aerial bomb killed 16 people at the shallow Arbatskaya station, and the next day at this station 46 people died in a stampede caused by a sudden raid. But the metro also gave life - during the war more than 200 children were born underground.
15. On the example of attitudes towards authorship of the Moscow Metro logo - the red letter “M”, the evolution of society is clearly visible. Before the Second World War, “material” professions were valued all over the world: skilled worker, civil engineer, etc.In one of O'Henry's stories, an American professor introduces himself to the parents of his girlfriend as a bricklayer, for who is a professor and what is his job in general? If the result of your labor cannot be felt with your hands and applied in real life, at best you serve those who work, and at worst you are a jester. Because of this attitude, the authorship of the very first letter "M", which appeared at the stations of the Moscow metro in 1935, cannot be established. There was a public competition with an award, but it failed. It is known for sure that the emblem was born in the architectural department of Metrostroy. The department was headed by the famous Samuil Kravets, who built the Derzhprom and the building of the Government of the Ukrainian SSR in Kharkov. The leading employee of the department was Ivan Taranov, who had a hand in the projects of all stations of the first stage. Some of them drew the famous letter. It never entered their head to be proud of such a trifle as “logo creation”. But when in 2014 the logo of the Moscow metro was modified, a whole studio of one famous designer was engaged in this. Upon completion of the work, the owner of the studio proudly announced that his team had done an excellent job.
