Moscow Subway Tour Fantastic on Viking River Preextension

Sometimes it's the really unusual stuff that's the most memorable. The subway stations built under Stalin are amazing with every station in central Moscow different. One with statues, another with mosaics, etc.

Our Moscow Subway Tour on the Viking River Preextension in Russia was amazing. We were there last July, i.e. July of 2016.

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Interesting! Thanks for sharing.

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Beautiful. That's a subway station?? Wow!

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Beautiful. That's a subway station?? Wow!

 

 

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they were all subway stations. There are about a dozen such stations

they were all subway stations. There are about a dozen such stations

That's great! I was in Moscow for three weeks while my husband was working over there four years ago. The subway system was the most fascinating thing I saw in Moscow. While those fabulous stations are indeed amazing, I didn't use them much for where I generally went. What consistently astonished me was the efficiency of the system. I hope you don't mind my posting the following from a blog I kept at that time:

A startling statistic that explains a lot: In a given day, the Moscow Metro moves more people than the subways of London and New York combined! It does this with great efficiency.

It is hard to convey the vast crowds of people as they funnel towards the escalators at any given time of day. They are kept moving by movable barriers that strictly separate the direction of movement. People are very orderly, though they do push and shove to get in and out of the cars, and they are not as good about waiting for people to get off as they generally are in Washington.

Everything moves extremely fast. It has to. Moscow is a huge city, and the stations are quite far apart. For the system to work well, the trains have to move at a tremendous rate, or so that is how it feels. Given the size of the crowds, the trains have to be extremely frequent. I have never had to wait more than three minutes when missing a train, and it is often less than a minute--seriously!. And they are still crowded, often solidly packed.

The escalators are very long and very fast. The Moscow Metro is the deepest subway system in the world and is entirely dependent on its escalators. I won't comment on the level of maintenance; I'll just say that if they functioned the way they do in Washington, the whole system would shut down. I have always been an escalator wimp, especially getting on the down ones. I have really had to adjust here--especially on my first time, coming from the airport with my wheeled suitcase. But I'm getting used to them.

The system is well marked. But the text on the signs is quite dense. You have to take your time to decipher it. No, none of the signs use Latin letters--why should they? And there really are a lot of Russian places with long names beginning with K. I cannot remotely imagine navigating the system without a knowledge of Cyrillic. For the most part, my level of competence allows me to slowly decipher words, letter by letter, rather than reading them as words. I'm getting a bit better with stations I use a lot, but even there, I've made mistakes when acting fast, proudly believing I read it right, only to find myself headed back to the station where I started out. But given the speed and frequency of the trains, I doubt that I have ever lost more than five minutes or so.

Mild3536 -- very interesting blog. A subway tour was included on our Uniworld Russia cruise. We were all fascinated and astounded! The tour with a guide gave some of our cruise companions the courage to use the Metro later during our free time.