Speedy Escalator's

In another rendition of "Remember When" generated by the internet, I had a lovely reminder today of a trip   a grand journey that I was on nearly 10 years ago.   In 2001, I and 3 extremely close friends ventured from our doors and traveled around the world with little more than 30 pounds of gear in our backpacks, our friendship, some money, and a willingness to experience food and customs far and wide.

One of the places we had the great fortune to visit was Russia, and specifically, as related to this web echo, the city of Moscow's subway system.  Unfortunately, I just checked my photo archive, and I don't have a single photo of any of the fantastic stations.  The only notes I can dig up are the travelogue that I wrote in June 2001, "Underground Touring."  (Please excuse the formating, the Virtual Tourist website has apparently changed their rendering language since it was written.  OOh, and a factual error about a station name  Mosokovskaya should be Mayakovskaya)

What brought this on was the article "In Moscow, escalators to carry the city" in the Washington Post from December 14th which discusses the escalators used in that subway system and their remarkable uptime and service load.  I'd suspect the WashPo included this given the recent coverage of the failings of the Washington DC Metro System's escalators. (<90% reliability I believe I read).

One of the the things that isn't explicitly called out, and which we commented on while there was the incredible speed at which the Moscow Metro escalators moved.  No dawdling in the way on these babies, easily moving twice the speed of any such device in the USA.  And while we were there, moving around, not a single person stumbled, fell or otherwise had a mishap to interrupt the quick flow of people on and off the moving steps, which were used, as far as we could see by people of all ages.