The Moscow Metro Phantom Train

The Moscow Metro is one of the largest underground rail systems in the world, carrying more than two billion passengers a year through a network of tunnels that extends, in places, more than seventy meters beneath the surface of the Russian capital. The system has run continuously since 1935, and in the decades since its opening it has accumulated a body of folklore that is unusual in its specificity and in the seriousness with which it is held by some of the system’s own employees. Among these stories, the most persistent concerns a phantom train: an unscheduled, dark-painted train of older rolling stock, said to run the Koltsevaya circle line in the small hours of the morning, carrying passengers whose features no witness has been able to describe. The phantom-train tradition is documented in Russian-language railway folklore and has been the subject of several published accounts since the early 1990s. Whether anything corresponds to it in the physical operation of the system, or whether it represents the natural folklore of a vast, dark, and never-quite-empty space, is a question that the available evidence does not allow to be settled.

The Setting

The Moscow Metro was built under conditions of considerable urgency, the first line opening as a showpiece project of the Stalin era. The system was designed not only to move people but to function, in the event of war, as a deep-shelter network. Stations were built with monumental architecture and massive blast doors at the entrances. The deeper sections are connected to a parallel infrastructure long the subject of speculation: the so-called Metro-2, a separate set of tunnels reportedly constructed for the use of the Soviet leadership in the event of nuclear war. The existence of Metro-2 has been partially acknowledged by Russian officials, although its current operational status remains classified. The Moscow Metro is not simply a transit system but a piece of infrastructure embedded in the security apparatus of the Russian state, with a long history of covert construction. The phantom-train tradition emerged from this context.

The First Reports

The earliest accounts of the phantom train circulated in the 1970s, principally among the maintenance workers of the Koltsevaya line, the circular line that connects the major rail terminals of the city. The line runs continuously around the central districts of Moscow and is, by virtue of its loop topology, capable of accommodating a train that runs without arriving at any terminus, indefinitely.

The reports describe a single train, generally said to consist of four or five cars of an older Type-A or Type-B configuration that was retired from regular service in the 1970s but that may have remained in storage for use as engineering or special-purpose equipment. The train is described as painted black, or as painted in the standard livery but with the markings worn away or covered. The lights inside the cars are dim, and the windows are partially covered, so that the interior is visible only as a dark space with a few suggestion of seated figures. The train is said to run in the small hours of the morning, after the public service has ended and during the period when the system is technically closed to passengers.

Witnesses, principally maintenance staff working in the tunnels during the closure period, report seeing the train pass at moderate speed, with no apparent driver visible in the lead cab and no acknowledgment of their presence. The train does not stop at the stations on its circuit, although a few accounts describe it slowing at particular platforms before continuing. The most consistent feature of the reports, across decades, is that the witnesses who have been close enough to see the interior have been unable to describe any of the passengers they reportedly observed; the figures are remembered as dim, indistinct shapes, sometimes counted in number but never characterized by feature, dress, or behavior.

Variants And Investigation

A number of variants have attached to the core tradition. In one, the train is said to be a deportation train, carrying the dead of the Stalin-era purges on a perpetual circuit beneath the city in which they once lived. In another, the train is associated with the Metro-2 network and is said to be carrying passengers between secure facilities of the security services. In a third, the train is said to be empty and is interpreted as a kind of mechanical revenant, a piece of Soviet-era equipment continuing its routine in the absence of any human direction. The deportation interpretation links the phantom train to the political dead of the Soviet period, in a manner parallel to the way the Ďáblice cemetery apparition in Prague has been interpreted in light of that city’s hidden Communist-era burial grounds.

The Moscow Metro administration has declined to acknowledge any phantom-train tradition. Routine engineering trains do operate during the closure period, and administrators have suggested that workers’ reports may correspond to such ordinary movements seen under conditions of fatigue and the disorienting acoustics of the tunnel network. The older rolling stock referenced in the reports was indeed retained in limited numbers for engineering purposes well after its retirement from passenger service. This explanation accounts for a portion of the report base but not for all of it; the reports of dim figures visible inside the cars, and of the train running on a continuous loop without stopping, are not consistent with engineering operations. The Russian writer Vyacheslav Pisarev, in a 2011 article for the magazine Itogi, interviewed several retired metro workers who maintained that they had seen the train and that the tradition was current among maintenance staff long before public discussion became permissible.

The Train In Russian Folklore

The phantom train of the Moscow Metro takes its place in a long Russian tradition of railway-related folklore that includes phantom trains elsewhere in the world but is also rooted in specifically Russian material concerning the railways as instruments of the state. Stalin’s Russia made extensive use of the railways in the deportation of populations, and the phantom train of Moscow can be read as folklore that processes the moral weight of that history. The fact that the underlying claim concerns a closed and partially classified piece of state infrastructure intensifies rather than diminishes the tradition’s hold.

Whether anything physically corresponds to the phantom train cannot be answered on present evidence. What can be said is that the tradition has persisted for half a century, has been reported by witnesses professionally familiar with the system and unlikely to misidentify ordinary equipment, and has accumulated the kind of secondary detail that distinguishes a serious folkloric tradition from a casual rumor. The Moscow Metro will continue to run beneath the city for the foreseeable future, and so, presumably, will the train that no schedule lists.

Sources

• Pisarev, Vyacheslav, “Призраки Метро,” Itogi, Moscow, 2011.
• Gor’kovsky, Yuri, Tales of the Moscow Underground, Eksmo, 2003.
• Wallace, Mike, “Beneath Moscow: Metro-2 and the Soviet Underground,” Wired, 1996.
• Chernobrov, Vadim, Encyclopedia of Mysterious Places of Russia, Veche, 2004.