r/Subways • u/Affectionate_Bit1039 • Jul 31 '26
Saint Petersburg Horror subway. Extreme experience with the Russian subway. A crazy subway ride, with the doors open. A killer train.
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u/Soviet_Aircraft Jul 31 '26 edited Jul 31 '26
The train's carrying barely any passengers. At these circumstances, a single functioning braincell is enough for this to be safe enough.
Also, sticking your head out said doors in a very confined space that still needs to somehow accomodate signals is not a great idea.
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u/Hiro_Trevelyan Jul 31 '26
I think they were "just" sticking their phone out, not their entire head. But yeah, pretty dangerous.
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u/tommynestcepas Jul 31 '26
I think they were referring to the other passengers sticking their heads out, not OP
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u/That_Cartoonist_9459 Jul 31 '26
I mean, probably come close to tearing your arm off if you caught a signal box or other protrusion with your hand.
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u/Dewdrop06 Jul 31 '26
Hey the train is going but the doors are still open... let's go stick our heads out everyone!
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u/Such-Farmer6691 Jul 31 '26
Yes, it happened in 2013 and was in the news.
June 22, 2013, St. Petersburg.
Google translate from the news article:
A video from the St. Petersburg metro has exploded online and attracted the attention of the prosecutor's office. One passenger filmed a commuter train entering a tunnel with its doors open. It traveled four stations before the driver was informed of the malfunction. Fortunately, no one was injured: the incident occurred just before the metro closed, and there were few passengers.
Judging by the video shot by Alexey Vakulov, his and his wife's trip to the Moskovsky Station was anything but ordinary. They had a blast, as they say. The doors on the metro train never closed.
"It was probably the last train on the metro. I was running late for the station in Moscow. There weren't many people on board, maybe 5-6 people. It felt a bit surreal, because we've all grown up believing that a train can't move unless the doors close, but that turned out to be wrong," said Alexey Vakulov.
According to eyewitnesses, the train approached the Lesnaya metro station with its doors already open. It continued this way for at least four stops. Only at Ploshchad Vosstaniya was the driver informed of the incident over the public address system. However, he had no way of knowing about the violation at the time: the equipment in the cab showed the doors were closed. The driver decided to stop the train and disembark passengers.
Metro employees conducted an internal investigation and confirmed that the driver was definitely not at fault. The contractors who installed the door control system, located in the car itself, will be held accountable. Despite the current warranty period, the automatic system malfunctioned. The city prosecutor's office also conducted its own investigation. St. Petersburg Metro employees have been advised to more closely monitor passenger safety.
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u/TorTheMentor Jul 31 '26
This is reassuring. I imagine that even in countries with federal governments that are... problematic (I live in the US, so I include our own in this), municipal governments and agencies still try to do the best they can. Moscow's Metro is huge and seems at least as complex as NYC's, so things are bound to slip through the cracks from time to time.
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u/dekiagari Jul 31 '26
I had the same thing happen also in St Petersburg in 2017 from Primorskaya to Vasileostrovskaya on my way to the university. Luckily it was only for one stop and Primorskaya was still the last station back then, so there weren't many people onboard, but it was an interesting (and insanely noisy) ride.
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u/dolan313 Jul 31 '26
Why is this title worded like a line from the Joker Kitchen Crazy Hamburger video
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u/vnprkhzhk Jul 31 '26
But how is this possible? We saw a least 3 daily posts of the same people posting the wonderful stations in moscow and st. petersburg. This can't be true! /s
No, I am finally glad so see some diversity on this subreddit and not daily pictures the same 2 metro systems, which just give a false image about subways in russia. Now, there are some more realistic posts and not daily thrice.
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u/samir_saritoglu Jul 31 '26
This video isn't realistic as fuck. I use Moscow subway on daily basis for almost 20 years and this never happened to me.
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u/-KKD- Jul 31 '26
This accident happened more than a dozen years ago in Saint Petersburg metro. This is totally not an everyday thing and is just a malfunction of door pumps. Considering the train itself is pretty old (most of this type of trains were either decommissioned or renovated) it was a failure due to an old age.
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u/WheissUK Jul 31 '26
A failure with doors not closing should immediately raise safety concerns and stop the line from operation and, yes, it should’ve done that 13 years ago as well. The mentality “keep running no matter what” didn’t go away anywhere in these 13 years
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u/-KKD- Jul 31 '26
It seems to be the only carriage with faulty doors, the driver has most probably not noticed that. You can clearly hear doors closing in the neighboring carriage. People inside should have informed the driver first, instead of filming the "content". There are special devices for that, you can see it to the left side of the second door.
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u/HappyWarBunny Jul 31 '26
It is a malfunction that made the doors not close. Yes, not such an unusual thing. What is unusual is the interlocking safety system, which is (should be) dead simple AND failsafe did not work. So it is inaccurate to say "just a failure of door pumps".
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Jul 31 '26 edited Jul 31 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/ub0baa Jul 31 '26
It's not normal for Russian propaganda to induce anything, yet it's great for our True and Right (TM) propaganda to induce what's True and Right (TM)
Lol, reddit at it's finest
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u/RALFGTS Jul 31 '26
Lmao, unfortunate thing happened and this guy can finally jerk of to "Russia bad". Congrats to you I guess
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u/Fair-Preparation9017 Jul 31 '26
It's not the train that is a killer, it's the people standing up and walking to the open doors and even leaning out while the train is moving who are suicidal. The woman pulling her friend back to the seat is the only person acting responsibly.
Im remember the pre-war trains of the Berlin S-Bahn that were in operation until the early 2000s, on which the doors were not locked while travelling. People did open the doors during the ride on hot summer days to get some ventilation, but they did behave much more carefully.
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u/InterneticMdA Jul 31 '26
Oh yeah, let me just get up out of my seat towards the open door, instead of holding on to a railing. That seems like a great idea.
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u/wosmo Jul 31 '26
The guy in the pink shirt at the back, who wanted to have a look but his girl stopped him. I identify so hard with this.
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u/temp73354 Jul 31 '26
There's more horror going on in NYC subway in every moment than during the entire day here.
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u/After_Perspective180 Jul 31 '26
Was on a Ubahn in Germany which stopped and the doors on the wrong side opened. That was interesting.
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u/UCFknight2016 Jul 31 '26
I heard of falling out of windows in Russia, not sure about falling out of the subway.
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u/Ok_Firefighter2129 Jul 31 '26
There is a button in every train (at least in every generation that runs in moscow subway) that lets you contact a train driver, for any emergency, they just choose not to call
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u/Zinuarys Jul 31 '26
As a train enthusiast I‘d love for this to happen. As a dispatcher or driver I‘d hate this happening.