The Moscow Subway

The terrorism incidents in Moscow yesterday left me thinking about the subway system there.  I was in Moscow in 1997, on a trip investigating grey market issues for 3Com - we spent a week in the city, with half the team taking a 36-hour round trip train ride to St. Petersburg mid-week.

Here's a subway map of the city's system - it's extensive and very efficient.  The Lubyanka Station, where one of the bombings yesterday occurred, is at the intersection of the purple and orange lines near the center of the map, while Park Kultury is at the intersection of the brown ring and orange lines, about 7:00 on this map.  Both are transfer stations so you can imagine how busy they were at rush hour.

My team used the subway a lot during our trip, but we never exited at these two stations.  You can't see it on the map, but I made a little pencil mark at all the stops we went to - a total of 8 during our trip, including Sokol, where the 3Com office was, and Belorusskaya, where our hotel was, both on the green line to the north.

Thinking about our trip in 1997 is a nice memory, but the events of yesterday were a shocking dose of reality - sometimes we forget that there are still places in the world where it's common to try and resolve differences with violence.  Oh, wait...