Six central metro stations on the Red (Sokolnicheskaya) Line — Kropotkinskaya, Biblioteka Imeni Lenina, Okhotny Ryad, Lubyanka, Chistiye Prudy and Krasniye Vorota — will be closed Saturday for track maintenance work, the metro administration said in an online statement Tuesday.
The Red Line is the Moscow metro's oldest line. Its first section, from Park Kultury to Sokolniki, was opened in 1935 and runs through the very center of the city.
On Saturday 1,100 metro employees will perform maintenance work, the statement said. They will replace defective rails, ties and other elements of the track on the 5.5 kilometer stretch of the line.
It will be the 16th metro line closure this year. Maintenance works have already been carried out on the Light Blue (Filyovskaya), Dark Green (Zamoskvoretskaya), Dark Blue (Arbatsko-Pokrovskaya), Purple (Tagansko-Krasnopresnenskaya), Orange (Kaluzhsko-Rizhskaya) and Gray (Serpukhovsko-Timiryazevskaya) lines.
The practice of closing stations for a whole day in order to conduct repair works came after a train derailment in July 2014 that resulted in the deaths of more than 20 people.