Trains in St. Petersburg

There is a subway system in St. Petersburg, called the metro as in Moscow, but it has a few differences. First of all, there are a lot more signs in English throughout the St. Petersburg metro compared to the one in Moscow, perhaps because St. Petersburg receives more frequent foreign visitors.

After all, since it is a port city there are international cruise lines which make stops in St. Petersburg for a few hours and guests can walk around.  If they don't know Russian they can still get around the metro by reading English.

Another noticeable difference between the metros in St. Petersburg and Moscow is that in the central St. Petersburg stations the tracks are not visible from the platform, has which walls along its edges with doors placed at the spots where the train doors will be. You don't see the trains coming or going, but you can hear them.  The next two photos show what such a station looks like on the platform.

It looks like everyone is waiting to go the bathroom. Here is one of the platform doors which opens when a train arrives.

The reason for this odd method of constructing subway stations, someone told me, is the possibility of floods.  If a flood entered the tunnel then the platform doors would keep the water out of the station.  Or maybe it is a way to make the stations into bomb shelters?

Ads in the escalator tubes of the Moscow metro are on the side walls, but in the St. Petersburg metro the ads are along the centrally lit area between adjacent escalators.

The Moscow metro runs entirely on plastic swipe cards, but in St. Petersburg tokens are still in use (along with swipe cards).  I was surprised when I asked for 4 rides and got 4 tokens instead of a card.

In the next photo are the rules of the Metro.  You must know them to be allowed to ride on the trains.

The weirdest metro station I saw was, without a doubt, Gorkovskaya. It looks like a UFO that has landed:

Its original shape, which was rather boring, can be seen at the Wikipedia page for the station.

In one of the central metro stations I saw an ad for a Hannukah concert:

I arrived and left St. Petersburg from the Moscow rail terminal (all stations are named according to the major city they go to), which on the inside has an impressive wall diagram showing all the rail lines connected to St. Petersburg:

In one of the shops in the station there were some Cheburashkas for sale which appeared Indian:

I waited in the station for the announcement of my train to appear, with its track number, on the large sign below.  (Note 5л and 5п mean different things: 5 left and 5 right.) In the smaller sign on the left is the time and the freezing temperature.

To the right of the big sign were two cigarette ads:

The noticeable thing here, to me, is how non-short their contracted word is for Ministry of Health and Social Development in the bottom of the lower ad: минздравсоцразвития.  That's shorter than writing out all the words, but why not make a truly short version like МЗСP instead?

While I was walking along the platform to my train car to return to Moscow, I passed another train line called "Grand Express" which had fancier overnight train cars: two beds per room.

Below is the cabin I had on my train ride to Moscow, which had 4 beds but there were only three of us there. I took the 4th pillow when the train started moving, but then I got paranoid that a 4th person might arrive in the middle of the ride so I put it back.