photo: Wikipedia/Moscow municipality assures the MCD-3 and MCD-4 construction plan: what will 2023 bring Russian Railways?
It seems like the unreasonably unleashed war in Ukraine and the associated sanctions are not preventing Russia from making grand plans. While the aggressor destroys the Ukrainian railroad infrastructure, its employees and civilians daily, the Moscow municipality approves a work plan to build tracks and stations at MCD-3 and MCD-4.
We are talking about the 85-kilometre MCD-3 Leningrad-Kazansky line, which will cross 24 districts of Moscow, running from northwest to southeast. 14 out of 42 stations will also have interchanges to the subway, MCC and commuter rail system.
In turn, the 86-kilometre MCD-4 of Kievsko-Gorkovsky direction will become the longest transport line of the capital, with 39 stations (18 of them interchanges) crossing it from west to east.
"We will try to do everything so that the number of the trains that operate on the routes to be completely replaced as soon as possible by the MCD-3 and MCD-4 launch," Maksim Liksutov, the Deputy Mayor of Moscow for Transport, said.
According to the MCD-3 and MCD-4 designs, these will be completely new routes. After the launch of MCD-3, trains will connect Leningradsky and Kazansky railway stations, and a new connecting branch along the Kyiv and Gorky directions is being built for MCD-4. Plans of this scale require large-scale work to improve the existing infrastructure: it is planned to build passenger terminals, reconstruct and build new stations, and develop four narrow sections of the Moscow railroad.
Particularly significant for MCD-3 and MCD-4 will be the reconstruction of terminal stations Ippodrom and Zheleznodorozhnaya, due to which a significant increase in the daily number of passengers is expected.
MCD-3 and MCD-4 are scheduled to be operational by the end of 2023, but with the increasing intensity of Russia's tyrannous military operations and the harsh sanctions following them, will Moscow be able to realize such an ambitious plan?