Russia Travel Tip: Navigating the Moscow Metro

Aside from the alphabet barrier, getting on the Moscow metro can be slightly confusing specifically when it comes to the line interchanges. Transferring metro lines on these interchanges threw me off a few times, so here's one important note: pay close attention to the station names. On some interchanges, the metro station name is the same on both the intersecting lines (this is true sometimes on the brown/circle line). But in most cases, the names of the stations on the same interchange but on different lines are still different. To illustrate, here is a map of the Moscow metro (English version):

Moscow Metro map from www.moscow.info

A couple of examples of interchanges that feature the same station name on both lines: Kievskaya applies to the all stations on the brown-blue interchange.

It's the same with Belorusskaya on the brown-green interchange.

However, in some cases, the names of stations on different lines in the same interchange are different. For instance, the brown-purple interchange features stations with different names: Krasnopresnenskaya on the brown line and Barrikadnaya on the purple line.

Or let's look at the much more complicated lime green-red-orange interchange where you have Christye Prudy (red line), Turgenevskaya (orange line), and Sretensky Bulvar (lime green line).

I got confused by this a few times because I'd sometimes end up looking for the wrong station name at the interchange. Case in point. Let's say I was going from Kitay-Gorod (purple line) to Mayakovskaya (green line).

The shortest path is to take the purple line going towards the "left" of the map, then switch to the green line at the purple-green interchange. I saw that the station before Mayakovskaya is Tverskaya so while on the purple line, I incorrectly thought that I would get down two stations later at Tverskaya. But remember, at that point I was still on the purple line. So in this case, the station on the purple line where I had to alight was actually Pushkinskaya. Only when I get to this station would I switch lines at the purple-green interchange to Tversakaya on the green line.

Did that make sense? Hopefully it did. The same also applies to the less-complex St. Petersburg metro.

St. Petersburg Metro Map from
 http://www.saint-petersburg.com/transport/metro/map/

I wanted to include this in my Travel Tips post but then I realized it was becoming too long so I thought of writing a special blog post dedicated to navigating the metro. Most of the time, I managed to figure things out before I got completely confused. In any case, when on the metros in Russia, make sure to pay close attention to the correct station names, especially at the interchanges. Next post: Travel tips.