Inside the St Petersburg Metro: The Museum You Must Book, an 86-Metre Station and Doors With No Train Behind Them

The St Petersburg metro is the deepest in the world by average station depth, and it hides two things most visitors never see: a working museum run by the operator itself, and ten Soviet-era stations with no platform at all.

The metro museum runs by appointment only

The Interactive Centre for the History of the St Petersburg Metro sits at 29 Odoevskogo Street, three minutes from Primorskaya station. The building is open daily from 09:00 to 21:00, but there is no walk-in admission: you must book a session in advance. Sessions start at 10:00, 12:00, 14:00, 16:00 and 18:00, the guided tour lasts an hour, and groups are capped at 25 people. Booking goes through the phone numbers listed on the operator's site (weekdays 09:00–18:00) or by email to [email protected], which is answered daily from 09:00 to 21:00 and is the only channel at weekends. Slots for the following month open at the start of each month, and during those days bookings are taken by phone only.

A standard ticket costs 700 roubles; the reduced rate is 500 for children aged 4 to 18, students and pensioners, and 630 with a St Petersburg citizen's card. The price includes the guide. Inside you get a cab section from a train, a station attendant's desk, a dispatcher's console, a working model where four 1960s carriages run through tunnels, and a construction cage that simulates a descent more than 70 metres down into the Cambrian clay. An English-language tour can be arranged for groups; a private visit for up to five people costs 5000 roubles.

Why the tunnels are so deep

The city stands on waterlogged sand and loam, and the only reliable layer for tunnelling is dense Cambrian clay, which lies very far down. The operator's own figures: 75 stations, six lines, 131 kilometres of track, 323 escalators. Admiralteyskaya, at about 86 metres, is the deepest station in Russia; before it opened in 2011 the record belonged to Komendantsky Prospekt at 78 metres. Entry to Admiralteyskaya runs through a cascade of two escalators, so allow several extra minutes.

The "horizontal lifts"

Ten closed-type stations were built in Leningrad between 1961 and 1972. There is no platform: you stand in a hall separated from the tunnels by load-bearing walls, and automatic doors in those walls open in sync with the train doors. Park Pobedy, opened on 29 April 1961, was the first such station in the world; its original frosted-glass doors were later replaced with metal ones. Drivers have to stop within 45 centimetres for the doors to line up.

What you can see on a single token

A single ride costs 95 roubles; a 90-minute city ticket is 106 and a 24-hour one 364. Ride line 3 from Vasileostrovskaya to Lomonosovskaya and you pass six of the ten closed-type stations in one go. One warning: transfers between lines close at 00:15, even while trains are still running.