While in Moscow, one often hears the expressions "ring metro station" or "radial metro station". For a nonresident person, these phrases are not always clear, so you have to figure out what is behind them.
The Moscow metro is a whole underground city, consisting of a dozen lines and more than two hundred stations. Its history dates back to 1935, when the first section of the Sokolnicheskaya line was opened.
Initially, the construction of the metro was planned in such a way that separate lines would connect opposite parts of the city. This was so until the opening of the Circle Line in the middle of the last century, a significant part of which runs at the level of the Garden Ring with some deviations from it for access to most of the railway stations in the capital.
Interchange stations have been built at the intersection of the Circle Line with others. It is to these stations that the concept of "radial metro station" belongs, since the lines crossing Koltsevaya are partly its radii. Accordingly, these lines themselves began to be called radial. These names come from the Latin word radius, which translated into Russian means a ray, radius, in geometry - a segment connecting two points on a circle.
There is a very interesting point here. Some stations of the Circle and Radial Lines have different names, and some are the same. The first include the following stations:
- At the Serpukhovsko-Timiryazevskaya line, Serpukhovskaya in the south and Mendeleevskaya in the north are interchanges from the Dobryninskaya and Novoslobodskaya Koltsevaya lines, respectively
- At the Tagansko-Krasnopresnenskaya line "Barrikadnaya" in the north there is an interchange with the "Krasnopresnenskaya" Circle line
- At the Kalininskaya line "Marksistskaya" has a transfer to the "Taganskaya" Koltsevaya
- At the Lyublinsko-Dmitrovskaya line "Chkalovskaya" there is a transfer to the "Kurskaya" Koltseva.
The second, which have common names, include most of the stations. It is just to identify them that it is convenient to use the terminology of annular and radial:
- Near the Zamoskvoretskaya line "Paveletskaya" in the south and "Belorusskaya" in the north
- Near the Sokolnicheskaya line "Park Kultury" in the south and "Komsomolskaya" in the north
- Near the Kaluzhsko-Rizhskaya line "Oktyabrskaya" in the south and "Prospekt Mira" in the north
- At the Tagansko-Krasnopresnenskaya line "Taganskaya" in the south
- Near Arbatsko-Pokrovskaya "Kurskaya" in the east
- The Kievskaya station stands apart. This name has a ring station and two radial stations at once, referring to the Arbatsko-Pokrovskaya in the west and the Filevskaya lines.
Therefore, in order to avoid confusion, it is customary to indicate the name of the station and its belonging to the Ring or radial station without mentioning the official name of the latter.
Taking into account the fact that the capital's metro continues its development, it will be interesting whether this practice of naming stations will continue with the final opening of the Big Circle Line. Currently, such a station "Savelovskaya" is located at the intersection of the Bolshaya Koltsevskaya and Serpukhovsko-Timiryazevskaya lines. But when crossing the Bolshaya Koltsevaya with the Zamoskvoretskaya and Tagansko-Krasnopresnenskaya lines, the crossing stations have different names: "Petrovsky Park" and "Dynamo", "Khoroshevskaya" and "Polezhaevskaya", respectively.
