Why does the St. Petersburg Metro have stations with ‘elevator doors’?
The St. Petersburg Metro has several closed-type stations. You won’t see the train arriving or departing at those stations. The platform is separated from the train tracks by walls with installed automatic sliding doors. They open at the same time as the doors of the arrived train. The Moscow Metro, meanwhile, has no such stations.
The first such closed subway station was Park Pobedy Station, which was built in 1961. Over the course of 11 years, until 1972, 10 such stations were built in then Leningrad – on the blue and green subway lines.
Closed-type stations allowed for the construction to be cheaper and simpler – in the 1960s, that became a deciding factor. It was more beneficial to cut passages from the platform into the tunnel, than to decorate the station part of the tunnel. Aside from that, the new construction design was safer for passengers.
But, their operation turned out to be more complex: not all train models fit such stations. The distance between the train doors has to precisely allign with the position of these so-called “horizontal elevator doors” So, because of this, different train models operate on different lines of the St. Petersburg Metro. Additionally, the maintenance of the “elevator doors” themselves requires additional funds.
