Reinforced concrete jungle

Pionerskaya station stripped down to reinforcement

At Pionerskaya, finishing work has begun on the western vestibule and platform. Why it is faster to build a house than to reconstruct a station - a Metrostroevets correspondent found out.

Now the western lobby of Pionerskaya resembles a reinforced concrete jungle: rods of old bent reinforcement grow out of the floor like trees, frames are visible in the walls, and the beams that used to support the roof are folded on the other side of the tracks. In just a month and a half, the lobby will be dressed in granite and marble, queues will form at the ticket machines, and an elevator will open in the middle of next year.

“Due to the future elevator, the area of Pionerskaya will increase by 246 square meters,” says Alexander Valakh, site manager at MMC International LLC. – New premises will appear.

Their outlines can already be guessed from the brickwork, which a team of builders recently began. Together with them, another 60 people work around the clock.

“There’s a lot of work that can be done in a day, but it takes us a week,” Alexander complains. – Look at the neighboring house under construction, it is almost ready, although they began to build it at the same time as us.

It's all about trains - passenger traffic limits construction, but there's no getting around it - citizens need transport. To build a new platform, you need to dismantle the old one. This can be done at night when the metro is not operating.

– We removed 2-3 slabs per night. Although they could have removed the entire span in two days,” Valakh continues. – We are currently working on the western vestibule. Later we will move on to the eastern one.

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Metro builders removed 70 tons of iron from the Pionerskaya station during its reconstruction.