Moscow Metro users have been fooled into thinking that underground trains are getting shorter.
There has recently been a conspicuous gap at the back-end of the platform when carriages pull up.
This has prompted some bloggers to speculate that carriages have been stolen.
According to media reports,though, the truth is that trains are stopping further up the track than they used to. Ironically, the reason they have started doing this is to get ready for the launch of longer trains, already cruising along the blue and brown lines.
The new trains will be rolled out across the entire network during the course of the year.
This comes as part of Sergey Sobyanin’s initiative to radically upgrade the Moscow Metro. The mayor hopes this could help to tackle the capital’s transport collapse. In as little as five years, the City Hall plans to build a whopping 79 kilometers of new Metro lines, with 27 light-rail stations and another 16 standard ones.
It is also promised that the Moscow Metro will become more user-friendly to disabled passengers. Access is expected to be improved by two per cent by the end of the year.
The city’s Metro is one of the busiest in the world, with up to 10 million passengers using it every day.