The Metro

Today I'll write about the subway system, called the Metro, which is a very efficient way to get around Moscow.  It's famous for its many beautifully designed stations. The first ones opened in the 1930s and new ones continue to be constructed.  More recent stations lack the amazing architecture of the older ones.  You enter the system by swiping a card (no tokens) and I usually buy a card which is worth 20 rides.  Someone advised me on my first day not to get a card worth 60 rides because it's more painful if you lose it; he was speaking from personal experience.

The basic plan of the subway lines can be seen in the picture below: there are many radial lines stretching out from the center and one (brown) ring line which connects to the radial lines and provides a way to transfer between lines without having to go closer to the center.  There are also many places where two or three lines meet and you can transfer underground between those lines through a series of staircases and escalators.

In the photo above I was waiting patiently for several minutes for that guy to get out of the way, but eventually I gave up and just took the photo with him in it.  Afterwards I realized that it's actually a nice photo because the ring line looks like a halo around the head, as in a traditional Russian icon.  This was fitting because the person was a religious figure of some sort, as you can tell from his outfit in a wider view:

Aren't I clever?

Here are pictures of the beautiful Komsomolskaya ring line station, taken in opposite directions within a few seconds of each other.  The contrast in activity in each direction was striking.

Let's take a closer look at the end of the platform in the second photo:

Overhead are many intricate mosaics, like the following ceiling scene.

The station closest to my apartment is Konkovo, which certainly lacks the elegance of Komsomolskaya:

The ceiling at Konkovo looks from a distance like rays of light, but up close the message looks more like "we ran out of paint".

Here is the train coming in to Konkovo:

A more modern train back at Komsomolskaya (with electronic signs inside the train cars):

These new trains have cars that seem twice as long, with an accordion-like central area:

The seats you see in the train above are mostly plastic, with a small amount of cushioning, but on another metro train I found seats with so much cushioning they were practically like couches.  Look how much of a bulge there is in the open seat:

One thing missing from all the Metro station is garbage pails. I discovered this when I brought a pastry into the Metro and then couldn't find any station on my route where there was a place to throw away my napkins. I had to wait 40 minutes until my Metro rides were over to use a garbage pail elsewhere. I learned later that all the garbage pails were removed because of concerns over terrorism (someone could hide a bomb there).  Perhaps for the same reason, there are police in nearly all the Metro stations.  They often ask suspicious people for their identity documents (where suspicious often means people with darker skin from the Caucusus).  I wanted a photo of the Metro police, but I didn't want to take one very visibly, so I faced one way and just pointed the camera from my hips and snapped the following picture:

In the evenings the Metro police often stood around texting instead of working.

Here is a video I made of a train arriving and departing at one of the stations (I don't remember the station name).

            

In the next video I catch a train at Kievskaya station.

            

There are digital clocks at the front of each tunnel which tell you the time of day (on the left) and the time since the last train left the station on that track (on the right).

1 minute and 6 seconds since the last train:

                                  

1 minutes and 22 seconds:

You idiot, you missed the train 7 seconds ago:

Trains come every 2 or 3 minutes all the time during the day, although late at night the wait can be longer.  Here is a photo taken after midnight showing more than 5 minutes since the previous train (the next train arrived a few moments later):

The nearest Metro stations to IUM are Kropotnikskaya  and Smolenskaya. (There is a second station on another line also called Smolenskaya, and that is used by students at the Math in Moscow program). I usually go to Kropotkinskaya.  There are two staircases from this station to the outside.  (Good luck with a wheelchair.) One staircase is meant to be an entrance and the other is meant to be an exit.  However, one door was installed backwards on the entrance side:

Five of the doors above are telling you, in red, that you can't go this way while one door in blue is telling you that it's an entrance to the Metro station that you're already inside.  It should be really easy to fix this, you'd think.  But Russia has more pressing issues to be concerned with.

Here are some views of Kropotkinskaya from the outside (the station is accessed through doors on the sides):

If you turn around from the last photo you see the very large cathedral of Christ the Saviour:

This was built in honor of the victory over Napoleon in 1812.  It took about 70 years to complete. It was demolished by Stalin in 1931 and then rebuilt in 2000.  Some people who exit the Krapotkinskaya station cross themselves when they see the church.

Some of the Metro stations were built very deep underground, so accessing them requires an exceptionally long escalator. Here are a few consecutive action shots on the escalator out of the Park Kultury ring line station.

One thing I noticed on the escalators is that the handrails move at a faster pace than the stairs, which on these looooong escalators becomes a real issue. You regularly need to release the handrail when your arm moves too far ahead.  I decided one time to grip the handrail and see how far up the handrail my arm would go without crashing into anyone in front of me. Here is the video of that.

            

Here is a video of the long escalator ride out of the Smolenskaya station (closest to IUM).  I think this would make a nice introductory scene for a Cold War spy movie, because if the audience doesn't know where in the world the escalator is located at first, at the end of the escalator ride it becomes quite obvious.

            

New stations are regularly being built, as are new parts to old stations.  For example, on Nov. 15 I entered the Oktyabrskaya ring line station, as I have done many times on the route to IUM from my apartment, and when I came down a staircase and turned a corner I saw in front of me a massive escalator which had not previously existed:

If you click on the photo to get a larger image, you'll see a metal casing on the ceiling behind the sign.   There used to be a wall in the space underneath the metal, and the metal part is where the new entrance/exit was joined to the existing station.   When you walk past a wall for a month and a half and then there is no longer a wall, it's a surprise.  (It's possible the escalator was always there but was hidden behind a wall during repairs.)


There are some interesting ads in the trains.  The first one below (click on it to get a larger image) is for a website about being a parent. The question at the bottom asks "What does a responsible parent choose?"  The choices are (a) put the kid in a corner, (b) sign her up for art school, (c) continue painting together, and (d) make repairs to the children's room. What happened to (e) make her eat paint?

The next ad is for "infinite" (i.e., unlimited) internet at work and at home, with a neat mathematical design.

I was waiting for weeks to take that last photo, but the trains were usually crowded, so I couldn't get a good shot.  There is also the issue of winding up in a car that has the ad in the first place. Even at 10 or 11 o'clock at night there would generally be people in all the seats and I didn't want to photograph an ad over someone's head. Finally one evening there was a miracle: I wound up on an otherwise completely empty train car.

This is when I snapped the photo of the internet ad, which fortunately was in that train car.  Back on the surface, I later saw another infinity ad, promoting winter tires on an Audi (click on the photo for a better view).

Here are two ads on the metro with the tagline "Trust the choice of scientists".  I don't think Einstein would know anything about digital cameras or laptops.

Homeless people, I believe, are not allowed to stay in the stations when they close, but back at Kropotkinskaya I found a sleeping dog a couple of days apart in exactly the same place. It was not dead.  The second time I saw the dog some people surrounded it and woke it up.

Some more dogs near the Tretyakovskaya (?) station:

Although this post is about the Metro, this is probably a good place to make some brief remarks about other rail transport.  There are many above-ground trains going out of Moscow to other cities, and on the electronic departure board below several train lines appear.

The interesting part of this photo is the (old) symbol in the upper left of Russian Railways. The winged wheels reminded me first of the symbol for the Detroit Red Wings, which seemed appropriate since that team has had a lot of Russian hockey players at the same time. Later I saw that the Red Wings symbol has wings arranged around a wheel in a different way, so it's not really close to the Russian Railways symbol.  The second symbol I was reminded of was the Nazi eagle.

Although people enter metro stations with swipe cards, on tram lines outside Moscow you pay for a ticket after boarding from a person who is walking around with a roll of tickets. Here are two of my tickets:

These 6-digit ticket numbers lead to the concept of a happy ticket (счастливый билет): that is a ticket number where the sum of the first three digits equals the sum of the last three digits.  For example, my ticket number 409463 is a happy ticket.  This concept does have a practical application: if you are teaching a course in probability you can ask the class for the probability of getting a happy ticket.  (This is the same kind of applied math from my first blog post about the Unified State Exam math books.) The total number of happy tickets is 55252, so the probability is 55252/100000, which is approximately 5.5%.  Strictly speaking the number of happy tickets might really be 55251 since the ticket number 000000 might not be produced. A discussion of this probability question, including a derivation of the number 55252, is here.