Passengers riding the Moscow metro Friday and Saturday will have the chance to take their journeys on historic subway cars as the underground network hosts a "parade of trains" in celebration of its 80th anniversary.
Train cars from five different series will be traveling around the city's Circle Line (Koltsevaya) in addition to the models currently used, the capital's metro service said Thursday in an online statement. They are the 81-760/761, Yauzo, Nomernoi, Yozh, and Retro-Poyezd series.
"The parade of trains will attract the attention of Muscovites and the city's visitors and will be an unusual spectacle for connoisseurs and lovers of transport," metro head Dmitry Pegov was cited as saying in the statement.
The 81-760 series is one of the newest series in the metro system — it has been in production since 2012. The Yauza series was produced between 1994 and 2004; there are only seven Yauza series trains still in operation.
The Yozh series was made from 1973 to 1977, while the Nomerniye trains were manufactured between 1976 to 2009, the metro said. The Retro-Poyezd (Retro-Train), which features padded seats and muted lighting, is a reconstruction of the first subway cars used on the tracks 80 years ago.
In addition to the train parade, retro metro wagons will be on display at the Partizanskaya metro station on the city's Arbatsko-Pokrovskaya (Dark Blue Line) on Friday.
A separate exhibition will open at Partizanskaya on Monday, where visitors will have the chance to see the maintenance trains that are usually only ridden by metro staff workers.
The Metro is also hosting a celebration on Saturday at Sokolniki park from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m.
As part of the anniversary celebrations, the metro also ran a competition called Kraski Metro (Paint the Metro), which gave the general public the opportunity to design the outside of a subway train. Vasiliya Potetyurina's design was chosen by a jury out of nearly 1,000 entries, and a train painted with her drawing will appear in the metro next Wednesday. A gallery of Kraski Metro submissions is available here.
The Moscow metro began operating on May 15, 1935, when Soviet leader Josef Stalin was in power. The first line ran from Sokolniki to Park Kultury, with a branch to Smolenskaya. Its total length was 11.2 kilometers.
See the Photo Gallery: 80 Years of the Moscow Metro