Record pace: it took 2–3 years avg. to build the BCL stations

Being an unrivalled project for the world’s metro building industry, the Big Circle Line (BCL) was built at a record pace, said Andrey Bochkarev, Deputy Moscow Mayor for Urban Planning Policy and Construction.

“The BCL project has been completed within the shortest time possible. Given its size and complexity, it’s quite a feat for all designers, architects, engineers, and builders,” noted Andrey Bochkarev.

It took an average of two to three years to build the stations, he said.

“The stations are sophisticated engineering structures, each having about 800 kilometers of cables and 55 engineering systems, including approximately 25,000 pieces of equipment that enables their operation,” said the Deputy Mayor.

The building process involved both cut-and-cover (i.e., in pits, to be covered with soil upon completion) and bored tunneling (i.e., with the surface remained undisturbed).

When doing architectural design, the designers developed some breakthrough decoration solutions. For example, they chose to use highly wear-resistant quartz agglomerate with a wide color range for Vorontsovskaya station, this being the first time of using artificial stone in the Moscow metro history, while a suspended ceiling of multiform laminated glass panels with 3-orange shade coating gives an innovative touch to Novatorskaya station, with glass used as a finishing ceiling material for the first time ever.

To finish street air shafts at Zyuzino station, the architects experimentally used chameleon aluminum panels for the first time in the metro building history to eventually turn the standard structures into art objects.

Earlier, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin opened train traffic along the entire Big Circle Line.

The 70-kilometer BCL including 31 stations is a pre-eminent metro construction project in Russia, connecting the existing and future lines of the Moscow metro and MCC/MCD platforms.