Moscow news
-
23-Aug-2007
New Metro Station to Open
The Moscow subway will have a new addition next week, with the long-awaited opening of Trubnaya Station scheduled for Aug. 30, just in time for City Day celebrations. Over 10 years in the making, Trubnaya will mark the first time in 20 years that Moscow has seen a new subway station inside the Garden Ring.
With just the finishing touches left before the public sees the new station, architects say it will resemble the stations of old, with the kind of elaborate design characteristic of vestibules and platforms built during the 1950s. And this is no accident, since Trubnaya is situated in the heart of Moscow's historic city center, at the intersection of Tsvetnoi, Petrovsky and Rozhdestvensky Boulevards. Exits from the platform will lead passengers to both sides of Tsvetnoi Boulevard. Trubnaya Station will have a transfer Tsvetnoi Boulvard Station on Serpukhovskaya, or gray line.
Trubnaya Station, an addition to the light green Lyublinskaya line, was slated to open in the 1990s, but the economic crisis of 1998 put the plans on hold for lack of funding. "Mainly it was the financing," Pavel Semyonov, a spokesman for Metrostroi, a construction company involved in the building process, told The Moscow News. "It didn't depend so much on Metrostroi and our capabilities as it did on city and federal authorities. They were debating who to pay for the subway."
Another problem was that the station, left untouched for over 10 years, had to be virtually restored. "When it was first built, it was paneled with iron," Semyonov said. "So it turned out that we had to restore everything that was inside. There was also water, dirt. Any underground building that is abandoned gets filled with all sorts of dirt."
He added that just a few finishing touches needed to be made before the station could be opened for public use. Trubnaya is the 173rd station to open in Moscow's sprawling subway system. The first station opened in 1935, making it one of the youngest - and by some accounts the most efficient - in the world. It gets between 8-9 million passengers where they need to go each day.
The Moscow Metropolitan has big plans for the next three years. "In 2008 30 billion rubles will be set aside for subway development," Marina Ogloblina, director of the city's economic policy and development department, was quoted by RIA Novosti as saying. "In 2009, 38.3 billion rubles, and in 2010 - 38.7 billion rubles."
The Moscow News