Down in the Tunnels, Tryin’a Make it Pay

Some years back (about 6 I think?) I spent a fair bit of time putting together a map of the post-apocalyptic Moscow Metro system of Dmitry Glukhovsky’s Metro 2033 series. While this was received pretty well by both the cartographic and Metro communities I was never 100% happy with it – in particular the way it echoed the inaccurate depiction of interchanges from the official map – and I always intended to go back and revise it.

So now I have.

After many hours of studying Moscow’s geography and trawling my way through the Russian Metro wikia (with the assistance of Google Translate) I have redrafted and updated my map to produce what is undoubtedly (by which I mean ‘doubtedly’) the best English map of the Metro ever produced!

A miracle of rare device! A sunny pleasure dome with caves… wait, that’s not even CLOSE to accurate…
Seize-Seize the means of production! Yes-Yes!

As is my wont I’ve included some information from the expanded “Universe of Metro 2033” books by other authors, despite some of them being a bit silly (I’m still not quite over there being Skaven on the Serpukhovsko–Timiryazevskaya line). I’ve also used some content from the Metro computer game series, which is based on the books but takes a number of serious liberties with them (any version of Metro 2033 where Artyom doesn’t spend a week being forced to shovel human waste out of toilet pits simply isn’t Metro 2033!).

My next insane project is a redraft of the regional Moscow map I found on the Russian wiki, which is highly deficient in various areas. I will take some time off first however – at least until I stop waking up in the morning with the names metro stations echoing in my head (ТеатральнаяТеатральнаяТеатральная…)

Tunnel Dweller

For the last couple of weeks I’ve been spending much of my time wandering the Moscow Metro system.

Not literally of course. I’ve merely been studying the crap out of it in order to produce a (hopefully) really good English Metro 2033 map.

I imagine there are plenty of really good Russian maps, but none of them appear to have been translated. All of the English ones I’ve been able to locate are sub-par at best. This situation could not stand, so I trawled the net for info, spent what seems like hours on Wikipedia and Google Translate, learned to read Cyrillic (sort of), and put together this miracle of rare frickin’ device.

Moscow Metro circa 2033
Behold its Majesty!

I’ve based it on the Metro as it was in 2002, since that’s when the first book was published. The Metro has been expanded since then but I’ve only included new lines and stations only if I can find evidence they’ve been mentioned in the series. Information from the computer games has been included only where it doesn’t conflict with the novels. I scraped together what information I could from the books that haven’t been translated into English and threw in a grid and index to make locating stations easier. Finally I included the original Russian names and various translations in the index, so no matter what version of the books you’re reading you should be able to find the stations you’re looking for.

People on Reddit seem to like it, which is all I can really ask for 🙂

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