RUSSIA: The third Moskva Central Diameter cross-city regional express route was opened by President Vladimir Putin and Mayor Sergey Sobyanin on August 17.
The MCD lines are being developed by modernising existing radial suburban railways and linking them up to form RER-style cross-city routes. The programme is being undertaken jointly by the Ministry of Transport, the city of Moskva, the Moskva region and Russian Railways.
The first two routes were launched in November 2019 and have since carried more than 600 million passengers.
MCD-3 was created by building a tunnel to join two existing lines to create a corridor running 85 km from Zelenograd on the St Petersburg route to the northwest of Moskva to Ramenskoye in the southeast. The are 38 stations and three more to open later.
MCD-3 will more than double the number of daily passenger seats on the routes, reduce intervals between trains to 5½ min the peaks, and offer lower fares.
The line is expected to attract people who currently use the Leningradskoye and Novoryazanskoye motorways and Vologogradsky Prospekt road. It will also relieve the metro network, with up to 15% of passengers on three metro lines expected to transfer to the new service.
‘It does not seem to be a very long route, but it is certainly needed by hundreds of thousands of people’, said Putin.
Services are operated by 11 Transmashholding Ivolga and 19 EP2D electric multiple-units.
