Urban rail electric transport is a guarantee of no traffic jams and a way to easily get from one point of a large settlement to another. Somewhere there are only trams, in megacities, as a rule, the metro also works. And there is such an amazing thing as the metrotram. I bet you're hearing this term for the first time? The only metrotram in Russia is located in the city of Volgograd. This branch has become a hybrid of the tram line and the subway. It is also called in Volgograd a high-speed tram. But how did it happen? First things first.
City needs metro
After the Great Patriotic War, Volgograd was almost completely destroyed. But the Soviet people do not care. And the huge city in just a quarter of a century grew anew and became even larger. In the 70s, a problem arose: the metropolis stretched along the banks of the Volga for almost 80 kilometers. And the authorities thought about what would be nice for the former Stalingradget your own subway line. This required huge funds, so the engineers had to come up with something less expensive.
So the metrotram was born - a hybrid of the tram line and the subway. The fact is that a tram was already running from the northern part of the city to the center, which crossed the roadway only three times, which means it could go quite quickly. So the engineers decided that it was possible to make shallow underground stations, into which ordinary "horned" would simply call in. So the first three underground stops were dug, and the third became both underground and aboveground.
Construction problems
When they started to dig tunnels, they faced such a misfortune - ground trams have doors on the right side. And according to metro standards, the exit from the cars is on the left side. Since they even saved on project documentation, they came up with the simply incredible - to cross the tunnels on top of each other. After all, there was no money to replace the rolling stock.
After the opening of the first stage, the authorities promised that the metrotram would eventually be converted into a regular metro. The workers dug three more underground stations, already without crossing the tunnels, but the country fell apart, the project stood in one place. By the way, stops of the light rail in Volgograd, regardless of their location, are called stations for some reason.
ST
November 5, 1984, the first cars set off on the route ST - high-speedtram, in other words. High-speed trams in Volgograd began to run through four districts of the city: Traktorozavodsky, Krasnooktyabrsky, Central and Voroshilovsky. In the north, the carriages started from the tractor plant, after the station "Central Park of Culture and Leisure" they went underground and followed to Chekistov Square, where there is a reversal ring, located already on the surface. The penultimate station of the high-speed tram route in Volgograd "Pionerskaya" became special - the trams went to it from the tunnel to the flyover over the floodplain of the Tsaritsa River. The overpass led to the ground part of the Voroshilovsky district.
ST-2
After a long 27 years, the second stage was opened. The region somehow managed to buy ten trams with doors on both sides of the cars. But this would not be enough to provide an adequate interval between arrivals at the station. Therefore, we decided to invent ourselves again - we came up with the second route ST-2. It followed from the reversal ring at the Monolit Stadium station in Krasnooktyabrsky district, and after Pionerskaya it entered new tunnels without crossing and ended at the final Elshanka in the Sovietsky district of the city. Chekist Square route ST-2 ignored.
Projects on paper
In 2014, the authorities started talking about the construction of the third, fourth and even fifth lines of high-speed tram in Volgograd. They planned to launch branches from the tractor plant to the Spartanovka microdistrict, whichon the northern outskirts of the city, from "Komsomolskaya" to the airport through the residential areas Seven Winds and Zhilgorodok, and from "Elshanka" to the Volgograd State University VolGU. But due to the lack of funding and the change of the governor, the ideas were not even designed on paper, but remained only in the form of ideas and presentations of engineers.
Light Rail Stations
On July 9, 2018, the light rail lines in Volgograd were connected into one as part of the ST-2 route. This became possible due to the fact that the rolling stock was replenished with modernized trams with doors on both sides, which were sent to the region free of charge from Moscow. In addition, the new governor found millions in the budget to buy thirty new trams with two-way doors.
The ST route was left, but it runs from 7:00 to 19:00 and single cars enter the line. A single line made it possible to get from the northernmost station to the final one in the Sovetsky district, that is, it united five districts of the long city and 21 stopping points, including six underground stations.
The speed tram schedule in Volgograd is quite convenient: trains arrive at the platforms every 3-5 minutes from 5:49 to 23:08. The fare is 25 rubles. The total length of a single branch is 17.3 kilometers. You can drive from terminal to terminal in about forty minutes.
The picture above shows what the light rail scheme looks like in Volgograd. The unique Volgograd metrotram annually transportsmillions of passengers and is a kind of attraction. Its stations are located at the most important objects of the city - the VGTZ, Barricades, Krasny Oktyabr factories, many educational institutions and even at the foot of the great Mamaev Kurgan. The light rail route was included in the top most interesting in the world according to Forbes magazine.
