Smolny discusses surface metro with Bamtonnelstroy-Most

At a city government meeting on 21 July, the issue of creating a surface metro in St Petersburg was raised. The plan is to use inner-city railway lines. The authorities have formed a working group that includes Bamtonnelstroy-Most (BTM-Most). First results are expected by October.

Denis Minkin, chairman of the transport committee, said the project requires substantial expenditure. According to him, the construction cost is comparable to the St Petersburg–Moscow high-speed railway, whose approved price exceeds 2 trillion roubles (about $22 billion at current rates).

The surface metro concept has been discussed in the city for several years. It cannot be implemented without freeing up inner-city railway lines, which in turn requires building a freight railway bypass around St Petersburg. Minkin stressed that this is very expensive construction, comparable in scale to the HSR.

Bamtonnelstroy-Most, owned by Ruslan Baysarov, is already a general contractor for a number of city projects. The company is building city sections of the Shirotnaya high-speed highway, except for the bridge over the Neva, as well as the Krasnoselskoye depot for the brown metro line. Previously it was expected that the same company could handle the construction of southern metro routes, to Pulkovo and Kudrovo (a town near St Petersburg).