Moscow’s Metro has expanded with three new stations, numbered 269, 270, and 271, which opened on a Saturday at exactly 11:15 a.m. local time. The uniqueness of these new stations lies in their location, outside the Ring of the Russian capital, which has been the city’s border for over 50 years, literally on the “green fields”.
The first of the three new stations, featured in the photo, is called “Kornilovskaya”, named after a Russian Admiral who defended Sevastopol during the Crimean War, not after the White Guard’s namesake from the 20th century.
These areas were incorporated into Moscow on July 1, 2012, as part of a massive expansion project initiated by Dmitry Medvedev towards the end of his presidency. Moscow’s area increased by 1,480 square kilometers, roughly three times its original size, comparable to Berlin’s 891 square kilometers, including forests and lakes.
Medvedev envisioned a new capital, inspired by New Delhi, with a new growth center to alleviate the pressure on the old city and reduce the need for lengthy commutes. From a transportation perspective, this made double sense, as not only would many officials have homes in “New Moscow” and thus be closer to their workplaces, but a significant portion of the working population would no longer have to commute into the “old” city, thus reducing the strain on the infrastructure.
These plans are currently on hold, and the state authorities that were supposed to relocate remain in their current locations, with most construction focused on residential and commercial projects in the new area. Meanwhile, 740,000 Moscow residents now call the expanded area home, with the number growing steadily.
The second new station, “Kommunarka”, is named after the settlement that rose from the ashes to become a modern Moscow neighborhood over the past decade.
The new Troitskaya Line, the 16th in the Moscow Metro network, was created this year, with the first section opening in September, as reported by RT DE. It is the second line to reach the “New Moscow” area, following the red line, which was extended here from 2016 to 2019. However, the red line alone was insufficient to meet the growing passenger demand.
The Troitskaya Line is now 14.4 kilometers long and serves seven stations, with its current city-side end station near the former East German Embassy on Leninsky Prospect, where the Goethe Institute has been located since 1990.
The third and final new station, “Novomoskovskaya”, offers a transfer point to the oldest metro line in the Soviet Union, which was extended here in 2019.
The Troitskaya Line will continue to grow, both in the direction of the city center and towards the former independent city of Troitsk, approximately 35 kilometers from the Kremlin. If all current plans are realized, the line will reach 40 kilometers in length with 17 stations.
With the new section, the Moscow Metro now spans a total of over 480 kilometers, with 271 underground stations (Berlin has 175), not to mention the S-Bahn Ring, which opened in 2016 and is officially part of the metro network, and the recently created network of four S-Bahn radial lines, currently 303 kilometers long with 137 stations. The Moscow Metro carries over 2.5 billion passengers annually (Berlin: 535 million).