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Saturday morning was spent (briefly) exploring the Moscow metro. Hopefully the pictures will do it justice, but it’s another of those tributes to what awesome things you can build if you don’t mind sacrificing really large numbers of people in the process. Aside from the blood flowing down the tunnels, the station spaces are amazing – from the escalator tunnels, the ticket halls, the over-bridges through to the station tunnels themselves, everything is enormous and high and beautifully arches. There’s little litter, almost no advertising, high quality buskers (so far, a string quartet, a bass guitar + trumpet combo and an beautiful solo violinist), and everywhere there’s a sense of restrained opulence – lots of bronze and brass, but no gold.
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The service is extremely frequent, and the larger heights mean the atmosphere is less stuffy than the London system. Though I’m fully aware there are Scandic saunas less stuffy than the Northern line in summer.
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Naturally, it’s not all great – there’s lots of staff, being less than helpful or doing very little; each escalator tunnel has a grey-haired witch at the bottom in a metal cabin, eyeing the passengers or simple reading the paper. Perhaps the worst thing is not the Cyrillic letters (which are getting easier) but the poor iconograpghy / visual design. It’s impossible to work out which station or line you’re on as you arrive at a station, the name being obscured and in low-contrast colours. Interchanges are almost never co-sited, so every line change is akin to the Monument-Bank situation (not all, to be fair). At least the interchange tunnels are equally massive – larger than a LU station tunnel.
Also doesn’t help if the tickets they sell you are void.