Inside Moscow's Metro

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.

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.

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.

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/

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.

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

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

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

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...

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/

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. :)

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

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

Interestingly enough, people on Caltrain do.

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

>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.

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.

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)

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

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.