Kyiv Metro
The Kyiv Metro is a rapid transit system in Kyiv, Ukraine, owned by the Kyiv City Council and operated by the city-owned company Kyivskyi Metropoliten. It was initially opened on 6 November 1960, as a single line with five stations. It was the first rapid transit system in Ukraine, and the third in the former Soviet Union, after the Moscow Metro and Leningrad Metro. It is one of the three metro systems in Ukraine, together with Kharkiv Metro and Dnipro Metro.
Today, the system consists of three lines and 52 stations, located throughout Kyiv's ten raion, and operates of routes, with used for revenue service and for non-revenue service. At below ground level, Arsenalna station on the Sviatoshynsko-Brovarska Line is the second deepest metro station in the world after Hongyancun station in Chongqing, China.
In 2016, annual ridership for the metro was 484.56 million passengers, or about 1.32 million passengers daily. The metro accounted for 46.7% of Kyiv's public transport load in 2014.
There are also Kyiv Light Rail and Kyiv Urban Electric Train, which are not parts of Kyiv Metro and are run by different companies.
History
Beginnings (1884-1920)
The first idea for an underground railway appeared in 1884. The project, which was given for analysis to the city council by the director of the Southwestern railways, Dmytro Andrievskiy, planned to create tunnels from Kyiv-Pasazhyrskyi railway station. The tunnel was expected to start near Poshtova square and finish near Bessarabka. A new railway station was to be built there, while the old railway station was to be converted into a freight railway station. The project was long discussed but eventually turned down by the city council.Kyiv was a pioneering city for Imperial Russian rapid transit, opening the first Russian tram system. In September 1916, businessmen of the Russo-American trading corporation attempted to collect funds to sponsor the construction of a metro in Kyiv. As a reason to construct it, the trading corporation wrote:
Despite the arguments, the project was not accepted by the city council, again.
After the downfall of the Tsarist government, Hetman Skoropadsky was also interested in the building of a metro system, somewhere near the district of Zvirynets, where the government center was planned to be built. As one of the members of his cabinet argued:
However, the project lost its support after the downfall of the Hetmanate in the autumn of 1918 and the change of the Ukrainian government towards the Directorate. Then, in 1919–1920, during the Russian Civil War, the project was shelved for good.
Following the Bolsheviks' victory in the Russian Civil War, Kyiv became only a provincial city, and no large-scale proposals to improve the city were made.
Initial promotion (1936-1949)
In 1934, the capital of the Ukrainian SSR was moved from Kharkiv to Kyiv. On 9 July 1936, the Presidium of the Kyiv City Council assessed the diploma project by Papazov, an Armenian graduate of the Moscow University of Transport Engineering, called, "The Project of the Kyiv Metro." The meeting minutes stated that "the author successfully resolved one of the problems of reconstruction of the city of Kyiv and establishment of intra-city transportation and also answered various practical questions about the Metro plan." The engineer Papazov received a bonus of 1,000 Soviet rubles for this project from the City of Kyiv. However, it is unknown if his proposals were taken into account in the plan. A few days before, on 5 July, the Kyiv newspaper published an article that featured a project of underground, prepared by engineers from the Transport Devices Institute in Ukraine's Soviet Socialist Republic's Academy of Sciences. The project promised to consruct three lines of a Metro, approximately long.Rumors started spreading that the construction of the Metro would begin soon. At first, the city council denied these rumors, amid letters from the specialists in the drilling and mining sectors offering their services. But in 1938, officials started preparatory work. However, this stopped abruptly in 1941 with the start of the Great Patriotic War. By the end of the war, Kyiv was destroyed. Being the third largest city in the USSR, a massive reconstruction process was ordered. This time, the Metro was taken into account.
Work continued in 1944, after Kyiv's liberation. On 5 August 1944, a resolution from the Soviet Union's Government was proclaimed. The resolution planned for underground construction, thus the government ordered the appropriate organizations to continue preparatory works, create a technical project, and estimate total costs. To finance this initial work, the USSR's National Commissariat of Finances allocated 1 million Soviet rubles from the Reserve Fund of the USSR's government. On 22 February 1945, another resolution was proclaimed, which definitively ordered the underground to be constructed.
To determine where the underground construction was most suitable, experts from the Kyiv Office of Metrogiprotrans analyzed the flow of passengers in the streets of Kyiv, both in the city center and in the outskirts. The analysis revealed three suitable directions to construct the underground: Sviatoshyn–Brovary, Kurenivka–Demiivka, and Syrets–Pechersk. The former two were chosen to be built. It was decided that the first section of underground openings along these two directions— in length—would be constructed by 1950.
This plan, however, did not come to life. The final preparations were not conducted until 1949. By the decision of the Ministry of Communication, the Kyivmetrobud enterprise was established on 14 April. Only then did the underground construction finally begin.
First phase
Construction planning of the first line of the Kyiv Metro began in August 1949. The initial plan had seven stations, and a project design competition for the stations was announced in 1952. The competition commission wanted all seven stations to have a Stalinist style: richly decorated and adorned with Communist symbols and national motifs. However, the competition was cancelled, partly due to the cancellation of the two westernmost stations and partly due to Khrushchev Thaw, which made the Stalinist style inappropriate.Tunnel drilling was frequently met with unanticipated difficulties—such as unexpected drilling terrain and underground water sources—causing the construction to fall severely behind schedule. In December 1951, the first connection between separate tunnels was made between Dnipro and Arsenalna stations, while the last was created between the Vokzalna and Universytet stations, in May 1959.
Various difficulties arose during the construction of the underground. For example, Arsenalna station was constantly flooded by underground waters despite its exceptional depth, which was originally intended to prevent flooding. Moreover, the project came to a standstill in 1954 when funding was instead allocated to the development of unused land fit for agriculture. Nevertheless, work progressed.At the beginning of 1958, a competition for the best design of stations was announced. A commission analyzing the works was created, consisting of activists, engineering and architecture experts from both the Ukrainian SSR and the USSR, sculptors, artists, writers, and the heads of the organizations Glavtunelstroy, Metrogiprotrans, and Kyivmetrobud. In July, an exhibition of 80 works was organized. The best five designs were used for the first five stations of the Kyiv Metro: Vokzalna, Universytet, Khreshchatyk, Arsenalna, and Dnipro.
During this construction, of concrete was poured, and of granite and marble were used to decorate the stations.
On 22 October 1960, a test run was made by Alexey Semagin, a motorman of the Moscow Metro, and Ivan Vynogradov, the former train operator from the central railway station of Kyiv-Pasazhyrskyi. Semagin drove, with Vynogradov acting as an assistant.
On 6 November 1960, the anniversary of the October Revolution, the five-station, Vokzalna–Dnipro portion of the east–west line was opened. That day, the motormen changed their places, and thus Ivan Vynogragov has now been deemed the first motorman of the Kyiv Metro.
Opening and aftermath
The underground was not available to the public the same day the line was declared open. During the first week, special passes had to be shown to ride the newly opened section. True public service only started on 13 November. At the time, the stations had no turnstiles; the tickets were shown to the inspector.Immediately after the Kyiv Metro's opening, the need for a train depot became a problem. It was not feasible to construct a permanent on-ground depot as the stations were deep underground. Yet the creation of an underground depot was costly. At first, it was solved by creating a temporary depot next to Dnipro station, where Kyivmetrobud had its headquarters at the time. There were some warehouses constructed as well so that necessary items could be substituted if needed. Unfortunately, this temporary depot was not connected to the main underground line. To move trains to the depot, an overhead crane was used.
Simultaneously, another logistics problem appeared: there was no connection between the underground and the railway. At the time, the metro line was served by type Д underground trains. To deliver them to the underground, the trains had to be placed on a special carriage at Darnytsia railway station. The carriage was then transported by trams to the temporary depot, where the trains were then lifted onto the railway turntable. Since the procedure was uncomfortable and tedious, most trains were stabled overnight in the tunnels and visited the depot only for maintenance.
At the time, the Kyiv Metro was under the jurisdiction of the USSR's Ministry of Communication, and not of Kyiv's city council. Until 1962, the motormen were mostly from Moscow, as no institution provided appropriate training in Ukraine. Some Kyiv railway engineers were employed, but they had to qualify as motormen in Moscow.