Saint Petersburg metro - subway

Saint Petersburg subway is an underground rapid transit system in Saint Petersburg, Russia. Formerly known as Leningrad Metro, the system exhibits many typical Soviet designs and features exquisite decorations and artwork making it one of the most attractive and elegant undergrounds in the world. Due to the city's unique geology, the St Petersburg Metro is the deepest metro system in the world. Serving nearly three million passengers daily, it is also the 16th busiest subway system in the world. Some of the features of the St Petersburg subway make it stand out amongst others, even those in the ex-USSR. It is customary to have all stations in the centre of a city to be built very deep, not only to minimize disruption, but also, because of the Cold War threat, they were built to double as bomb shelters (and many old stations do feature provisions such as blast doors and air filters). However, in most cities, as the lines reach the outer residential massifs, the lines become shallow (and in some cases even surface). However, in Saint Petersburg this is not the case. The difficult geology means that of the 60 stations 53 are deep level. The design and architecture went through numerous phases. The original stations were predominantly pylon type of which there are 13 stations. Also popular was the column layout, and there are 14 such stations in the system.

Saint Petersburg subway map