Aeroexpress, a company that operates commuter train services from Moscow airports to the city, intends to introduce the first intermediate stop for its trains. Starting from the morning of Thursday, September 6, all trains running between Sheremetyevo Airport and Belorussky Station will stop at the Okruzhnaya platform, where passengers will be able to transfer to a number of other transport lines, reports our own correspondent for Travel.ru.
The essence of the transportation will remain the same: Aeroexpress trains will only be able to travel to and from the airport, intracity transportation is not permitted. Thus, it will be possible to travel from Okruzhnaya to Sheremetyevo and back (at standard rates or Aeroexpress discounts), but not between Okruzhnaya and Belorussky Station.
Departure from Okruzhnaya is scheduled 13 minutes after the train leaves Belorussky Station - that is, as a rule, at 13 and 43 minutes past the hour. Travel time between Okruzhnaya and Sheremetyevo varies for different trains - usually from 21 to 24 minutes. The stopover time at Okruzhnaya will be 30 seconds. The arrival and departure schedule at the final terminals does not change with the appearance of an intermediate stop.
At Okruzhnaya, you can transfer to three other high-speed transport lines at once: the Lyublinsko-Dmitrovskaya metro line, the MCC surface ring line (also known as the 14th metro line), and the Savelovsky direction commuter trains (their platform was recently moved to make transfers to other lines easier). In addition, several bus and trolleybus routes pass there or nearby. This will significantly simplify and speed up travel to Sheremetyevo for residents of many areas of the northern part of Moscow, as well as for those who live along the MCC and Lyublinsko-Dmitrovskaya lines.
The first information about Aeroexpress studying the possibility of organizing intermediate stops in the future on all three of its routes – to Domodedovo, Sheremetyevo and Vnukovo airports – appeared in the summer of 2017. However, at that time the carrier hastened to declare that it knew nothing about this and asked the media that published these reports to “cancel” them.
However, as we can see, these plans are now gradually turning into reality – albeit with the same veil of secrecy: there is still no news about the new stop or schedule amendments on the company's website. Intermediate stops for Aeroexpress are a long-overdue and overripe decision, even though they began to consider it only after a serious drop in passenger traffic, which amounted to 30% in 2015-2016.
The situation with rail service to Moscow airports can hardly be called normal precisely because two of the three airports have only express lines. Only to Domodedovo does a regular commuter train go – and that’s only because it historically existed long before the Aeroexpress appeared.
At the same time, residents of the areas through which the Aeroexpress routes pass are often deprived of adequate transport to the corresponding airports and are forced to travel by roundabout routes with transfers. This situation looked most absurd on the Sheremetyevo line: passengers from the north of Moscow could still get to the airport only with a great loss of time along completely inadequate trajectories.
There are practically no cases abroad where only express rail service to airports is organized. The only example of this is Hong Kong Airport – however, there are also a dozen and a half bus routes there, serving almost all areas of the city, and an alternative station for the regular metro is only a five-minute bus ride from the airport.
In the vast majority of cases abroad, regular trains or the metro run alongside the non-stop express. In an even greater number of airports, there are no express trains at all, and only trains with stops in various parts of the city run.
Source: travel.ru