Tashkent Metro

The Tashkent Metro does not begin with an excavation pit, but with a master plan that had to be rewritten after 1966. In December 1966, a new master plan for Tashkent, destroyed by an earthquake, was discussed in Moscow. The city's chief architect, A. V. Yakushev, reported the figures: twenty thousand hectares, an estimated population of one million two hundred thousand, nine planning districts. And separately - transport: the distance from the northeastern to the southwestern city border was already about twenty-five kilometers then, and a citizen had to get from home to work in thirty minutes. To achieve this, the report stated, it was necessary to rebuild the street network, lay high-speed roads, and construct a subway line. Thus, the metro got into the city restoration plan - not as a decoration, but as a condition for a city of this size to function at all. Planners checked this on foot. Before drawing the route, they rode from one end of Tashkent to the other by tram, trolleybus, and bus, with a stopwatch, and at the finish line, the stopwatches showed seventy to eighty minutes. This was pure time, without waiting at stops and without transfers. A metro train promised to cover the same path in twenty. Then began a difficulty that no Soviet metro had before. A fair part of the route ran through loess - a soil composed of dust particles. Let rain fall on such soil, and it settles, spreads, flows; and here there were not drops of rain, but underground streams and lakes. "No one in the world has yet managed to lay an underground in dust mixed with water," a TASS correspondent wrote in December 1971. The solution was found in an ancient technique. There is a legend about how the Bukhara Kalyan Minaret was built: an unknown master ordered to dig an excavation pit for the foundation and fill it with water, and when the soil absorbed the water and the bottom settled - to fill it again. The ruler hurried, the architect suddenly vanished, and in the spring he appeared before the angry emir with the words "now you can build." After three dampings, the bottom of the excavation pit hardened as if tamped, and the minaret still stands. Modern hydraulic engineers developed this method and learned to build dams from collapsible soils, and Moscow planners found a layer under Tashkent where the loess is already moistened by groundwater and compacted to the limit. This was called a gift: had there been no such layer, the soil would have had to be tamped - striking every span six times with a one-thousand-kilogram "rammer," and this would have cost millions of rubles. Nature, however, was not fully trusted. The compacted layer was dressed with a sand-cement mixture so that rain and melt water would not seep under it, and the reinforced concrete foundation of the tunnel was extended on both sides with "wings" diverting water to the side: the tunnel not only rests on the soil, it also protects it. From here comes the main feature of the Tashkent metro - it is of shallow laying. On the route profile drawing, "start of the open method" is marked seven times: seven sections, more than half of the entire first line, were going to be built by trench. A trench is when bulldozers and excavators remove soil along the street, cranes put ready-made tunnel boxes in place, reinforced concrete slabs are laid on top, and ground traffic is returned. On such a scale, this method was used for the first time. And for the first time, trenches were dug with natural slopes, without steel bracing: usually, a ton of bracing goes into each running meter, a significant part of which cannot be retrieved later - so already in the design, as was believed then, twelve echelons of metal were saved. And seismicity. Rectangular cross-section boxes, divided in two for both tracks and reinforced with monolithic belts, were designed for nine-point tremors with a considerable margin. But strength is not enough: flexibility is also needed so that local ground movement does not tear apart a too-rigid structure. Houses in such cases are divided by joints into sections - and the tunnel was also cut by a joint every fifty meters. The country's seventh metro and the first in the Soviet East. It used the experience of Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, Tbilisi, Baku, and Kharkov, but sought its own solutions - and in 1971 the correspondent confidently predicted that the terms "Tashkent solution," "Tashkent method," "Tashkent technique" would enter practice.

The first line of the Tashkent metro has a precise birth address: drawing "T-3-33", issued by Moscow's Metrogiprotrans. It decodes simply - "T" means Tashkent, the three is the route department, and thirty-three signifies the final version. Like a bent bow, set with one end on the southwestern outskirts, the line crossed the entire city. On the eve of 1972, the institute issued the first working drawings. Even then, almost everything was known: where the route would run, how many passengers each station would take, how the ventilation would work. And there were station names - the ones that seemed obvious. Here is what it looked like in December 1971. The first station - "Dustlik", "Druzhba" (Friendship), at the city gates: the metro was becoming, as it were, a continuation of the Greater Uzbek Tract, and city guests found themselves among the seventeen thousand passengers with whom the trains began their daily runs. Further - by thirty, forty, fifty thousand: the stations were located in the busiest quarters of Chilonzor, where more than three hundred thousand people lived, and half a million were promised. Showing the project, the institute laid out photographs - fields scarred by ravines, adobe houses with earthquake scars. The vacant lots were also filmed at the sites of the future stations "Farhod", "Sobir Rakhimov", "Mukimi". Then - "Park Kultury" and "Komsomolskaya", which were to serve the reconstructed Beshqayragʻoch, Chorsu, Olmazor, and Furqat. Then "Pakhtakor" - the stadium, Navoi street, the Palace of Arts, theaters. Then Lenin Square, then Revolution Square, from which eight street-rays diverge. Along one of them, Pushkinskaya, the route was continued by the stations "Moskovskaya" - near the quarters gifted to Tashkent by Moscow after the earthquake - and "Kosmos", where the routes of suburban trains and buses to the northeast converged. The 16.2 kilometer long line was closed by the station "Tinchlik", "Mir" (Peace). The continuation was conceived through the Academic Town and the new housing estates of the northeast to the tractor plant - then the first line would have reached 20.8 kilometers. The second stage was to connect the Northern housing estate with the airport, the third to run from the northwest to the east. Three diameters, over fifty kilometers, almost half of all passenger traffic of the large city. Two stations were described separately as unusual: "Mukimi" and "Tinchlik". A huge expanse above the tracks and platform was covered there by a continuous vault, columns were not required - the monolithic reinforced concrete frame itself was load-bearing. And in the Academic Town, at the station named after the great astronomer Ulugh Beg, star-lamps were supposed to flash on the blue vault. The first stations were scheduled to be built by the fiftieth anniversary of Soviet Uzbekistan, by 1974. They opened on November 6, 1977 - nine stations. The first line was completed in August 1980, bringing it to twelve stations. By the end of 1987, there were nineteen of them across the entire metro - a union magazine back in 1983 promised these nineteen by 1985. The second line went not to the airport, but from the stadium to the railway station and further west, to Qorasuv. The third, to Yunusabad, by 1990 was scheduled for launch in 1995, and opened in 2001. Of the names of 1971, neither "Farhod", nor "Mukimi", nor "Park Kultury", nor "Kosmos" appeared on the first line; "Moskovskaya" was renamed "Hamid Alimjan" even before opening; the station named after Ulugh Beg appeared in 1992 in place of "50 Let SSSR" and not in Akademgorodok. And "Tinchlik" opened only in 1991, fourteen years later and at the other end of the city from where it was drawn. Vaulted stations without columns, however, were built - and not just one.

In early 1988, the republican magazine "Architecture and Construction of Uzbekistan" dedicated its entire issue to the metro. The occasion was a round anniversary: the metro system marked its tenth anniversary, and this date coincided with the launch of two new stations, "Tashselmash" and "Chkalovskaya". The result was not a jubilee album, but a conversation unlike any other in our corpus for any single object.

The Soviet era of the Tashkent metro ended on April 30, 1991, on the eve of May Day: 'Tinchlik' and 'Beruni' opened, and the Uzbekistan Line was completed. Twenty-three stations, thirty-one kilometers. But how hard it was won, the newspaper described half a year before, and we have no text of such power regarding individual stations. On November 1, 1990, 'Pravda Vostoka' came out with the headline 'Launch... without fanfares'. Contrary to established tradition, the newspaper wrote, on November 7 the 'Tashmetrostroy' trust would not hand over two new stations to the operators. The stations were practically ready. The tunnels were not. An unprecedented case in the history of the trust. Then the metro builders themselves spoke. 'We are sitting at zero with many materials,' explained A. Krivolapov, chairman of the labor collective council. 'There are no sleepers, no cement, an acute shortage of metal, timber. People come out for a shift and stand idle due to the lack of concrete.' Usually, the pre-launch period caused a special surge of enthusiasm among workers, he added, and now - and broke off his sentence. The reason was not mismanagement. The metro was transferred from all-Union construction projects to city and republican ones, and the local budget had to maintain it. To keep two and a half thousand trust workers working steadily, twenty-seven to thirty million rubles a year were needed, backed by materials. For the coming year, the local budget allocated eleven. The all-Union Ministry of Transport Construction took a wait-and-see position: it had neither funds nor stocks. What this meant in practice can be seen from one episode. Under a direct contract, the trust was supposed to receive several thousand tons of cement from the Navoi Cement Plant and gave metal and sleepers, which it desperately needed itself, in exchange. The cement was not brought: at the plant they said that the contract was concluded with the ministry, so let the ministry allocate it. A car with timber sent from Arkhangelsk Oblast on September 11 never reached Tashkent - the railway workers considered it useless to look for it anymore, intercepting it at some siding. G. Shtern, the trust manager and people's deputy of the Uzbek SSR, rejected ultimatums: 'We do not need special conditions, a most-favored-nation regime. We want one thing: the construction of the Tashkent metro must be backed by finances and material and technical support.' Otherwise, he said, specialists in unique professions will disperse - and who will build the metro. To the same time belongs another story: the 'Tashselmash' and 'Chkalovskaya' stations stood closed for environmental reasons, metro workers were poisoned in the tunnel by a complex of gases, and the metro corrosion laboratory was looking for the source - from the fuel and lubricants warehouse to the version of oil rising through the faults of the earth's crust. This story is told in detail in the 'Chkalovskaya' card. The article ended like this: regular traffic to 'Beruni' will begin at the finish of the year, without pompous rallies and applause, and the only thing that will be observed is that those who built the section will ride the first train. The line was opened in April 1991. Yunusabad was promised by 1995; it opened in 2001.