Easy as ABC

This is the last one, I promise.

Unlike most metro systems, Prague's was built all in one go, back in the 1970s.  While London or Berlin or even Liverpool have underground rail networks that were cobbled together - a Victorian line connects into a 1930s extension with remodelled 21st Century stations - Prague's city fathers took the all-or-nothing approach.  Well, actually, they decided to build a tram tunnel, only for their Soviet paymasters to decide that wasn't impressive enough and paid for a fully-blown metro instead.

The result is a network that has all the benefits of forward planning.  The three lines (A, B and C) cross the whole city, intersecting in the centre in a triangle (the classic Communist plan); it means you can get anywhere with only one change.  The stations are bright and airy with themed wall decorations and a unified look.

Ok, if we're being fussy... it's a bit samey.  There are different colours and signs and things but it still looks a bit similar from station to station.  You'll see what I mean.

Staroměstská - A

Right in the city centre, this is your classic Prague Metro station.  Escalators lead down to a central hall, with a platform on either side.  It's a design that the Communists have done really well, but it uses up loads of space.  Really you have to be a dictatorship who's not bothered about knocking people's houses down to build a hole in the ground.

Head onto the platform itself and you see Prague's famous design aesthetic.  The walls are covered with an aluminium design that looks like something out of Austin Powers' living room.  Each station is coloured differently, so you can tell them apart, but they all have this metallic sheen and the roundel design.  It also has this weird optical illusion where if you stare at it for a while, the scooped out circles start looking like bobbles.  We started referring to the walls as being made out of Dalekanium as a result, because we're geeks.

Go on.  Look at the ones on the ceiling compared with the ones on the bottom.  It's a Dalek!

Národní třída - B

The downside of that 1970s construction?  Extremely uninspiring station buildings (where they exist - there's a lot of stations with subway only access).  I know it's being rebuilt, but seriously, not nice.  It's a bit better from the inside, as daylight can penetrate through the glass walls, but it's still not exactly Canary Wharf.  

Still: shiny!  It gets even shinier once you get down to platform level, as Line B doesn't have the Dalekanium walls.  Instead it has a smooth one colour finish which is actually quite classy.  Shame it's brown, really.  What was it with brown in the Seventies?  Seriously, it's like it was the only colour in everyone's swatch pack.  That and orange.  Wasn't it a depressing decade enough already, with the oil crisis and the three day week and stuff?

I suppose brown plastic's not so bad when it's shiny (looks pointedly at Merseyrail's formica nightmare).

Můstek - A B


Like Berlin, the Prague Metro operates on the trust system - buy a ticket, stamp it and that's the last time you'll be checked.  Unless there's an inspector of course.  Unlike Berlin, however, all the stations have a ticket kiosk where a disinterested person can be interrupted from their paper to flog you a day pass.

The wall decoration on Line A at this station is gold, reinforcing the whole Dalekanium thing even more.  Though it does bring back unpleasant memories of that episode with the hybrid human-Dalek on top of the Empire State Building.  Shudder.

Head down to Line B and they've got a nifty little feature to show you it's an interchange station (which for some reason isn't on the A platform).  See the coloured boxes next to the name?  That's a big yellow box, because you're on the B, with little green ones to indicate there is also a Line A service available.  I love that.  So simple but so effective.

Muzeum - A C

The second of the three transfer stations, Muzeum's at the other end of Wenceslas Square (which isn't even a square, more of a boulevard).  As with Můstek there's no street presence, but there's a fairly large underground building, full of dodgy fast food stalls and annoying French tourists pushing their backpack right in your crotch.

Mmm, goldie-bronze.  Head over to Line C and we get our first glimpse of the red's design theme - marble.  When those Commies decided to build a metro, there's no expense spared.  I miss them sometimes.

Náměstí Republiky - B

This station takes full advantage of its position under a public square to spread out.  Look at the space there, in an underground station; it would be unheard of in the West.  There's a second reason for all that space though - Line D, planned on pushing through here sometime in the near future.  

Until then we have the station's funky metallics to look at.  Is it just me, or does that look an awful lot like the tiles in the lift of Willard Whyte's penthouse in Diamonds Are Forever?  Yes, it probably is just me.

Sadly, even though they had all that space to build on, there's no station building at all up top, so I had to pose in front of a billboard.  The shame.

Florenc - B C

The advantage of a three line, three interchange system is that you can have a very simple line diagram as well.  Weirdly, Prague may be one of the few cases where I prefer the in-car diagrams to the actual official map.  This is the network:

Pretty much your standard city metro plan.  However, the in-car diagram takes those three designs, moulds them round a central triangle, and makes them something a bit special:

Good design doesn't have to be showy or glamorous: sometimes it can be in the most humble of places.


Forming the third point of that triangle is Florenc, and can you tell I'm running out of things to say about these stations?

There is nothing wrong with Florenc.  It's a nicely designed interchange station, with plenty of space, lots of lifts, lots of escalators.  It's got a nice bit of business going on at the platforms, with some pretty backdrops.  It's just another Prague station.  I miss the occasional bonkers design of Berlin.  Where is the hallucinogenic monkey?

Still, there are those coloured blocks again.


Hlavní nádraží - C

Back to the main railway station.  You might remember, way back at the dawn of time when you started reading this blog post, that I said the Prague authorities planned a "pre-metro" scheme - a tunnel for the trams under the city, not a proper full-sized underground.  The decision to make it a full blown subway system came very late.  In fact, construction was already underway.  Work on Hlavní nádraží had started, so while the city ran around redrawing its plans, they built the station as it was.  

It means that this station has two side platforms, rather than the central layout in the rest of the network. That rubbish extension to the main building also means that there's masses of room.  Look at the size of those platforms - you could fit an army on there.

Anděl - B


I headed out to this station because of what it used to be.  When it opened in 1985, the station was called Moskevská - Moscow station.  In a symbol of "international friendship", a Moscow station was opened in Prague and a Prague station - Prazhskaya - was opened on the Moscow metro.

In addition to the name, the walls are decorated with bronze friezes celebrating the glories of the Soviet Union.

Which is a bit embarrassing in 2011, let's be honest.

I mean, I love all that Soviet imagery myself.  I wish I'd been able to travel to the East before the Berlin Wall fell.  When I was a kid, I always wanted to be the Russians, not the British, in the war games.  Something about it just appealed to me.

Obviously, it's a lot nicer to be sitting in the West, loving the Soviets, rather than operating under the Communist yoke.  

None of this went down very well after the Velvet Revolution, and Prague changed the name of the station to Anděl, after the local district.  They changed some of the other station names at the same time - Dejvická used to be called Leninova, and Vyšehrad was Gottwaldova, after a former Czech Communist leader.


The downside of this renaming is that the sign isn't completely symmetrical above the escalators.

This is the kind of thing that keeps me awake at nights.


Náměstí Míru - A

Incidentally, I love the Metro logo.  Not only does it incorporate an M, it also forms a little arrow pointing downwards.  Very clever.

This station actually came at the request of the BF.  Yup, he's starting to get the bug.  Náměstí Míru is on top of a hill, so to reach the underground platforms, you have to travel down one of the longest escalators in Europe.

It takes two and a half minutes to get from the booking hall to the platforms.  It'd be even longer if Prague didn't run its escalators at light speed.  Seriously, I nearly lost a leg climbing onto those buggers.      I felt a bit nauseous, I don't mind telling you, and I clung to the handrail for dear life.

Down on the platform we've got some more Dalekanium, but in a tasteful blue.  At least it's not brown.

Bonus Tram Section:


Yup, Prague's got loads of trams as well as a metro.  We rode a few of them, but the one journey that stood out was one we took by accident.  We were heading up to the castle (the BF has a pathological hatred of walking up hills) but we took a tram in the wrong direction.  It meant we ended up on this tram.

It left the city centre and headed out into the suburbs.  Big ugly apartment blocks.  Depressingly tiny bars.  A Tesco the size of Wales.  Prague is a beautiful city, but leaving the historic centre reminded you that it's a diamond set in a Lizzie Duke ring.  It was a miserable journey out to the terminus (the BF insisted that we go all the way to the end) and when we got to Nádraží Hostivař we got to enjoy a windswept, rainy tram stop beneath a flyover.

Feel the joy.


And that was Prague, and, you'll be glad to hear, the last of my holiday snaps.  I'll get back to Merseyrail now, I promise.

Under the Dome

It's taken me longer to write up this holiday than to actually take it.  If you're interested in the Berlin leg, you can find it here, here and here.  And the train trip to Prague was covered here.

After the gleaming, shiny Berlin Hauptbahnhof, Prague's Central Station was a bit of a shock.  Rusty ironwork that stained the glass roof, dark underlit platforms.  Just not the same.

Down below, you enter a world of 1970s glamour, the type that smells of Brut and Joan Collins.  It was built by the city authorities thirty years ago on top of a park, incorporating a metro station below and a dual carriageway on top.  EU money has since been pumped into it to improve it (i.e. provide more shops) but it still feels  like the architect had a big handlebar moustache and a medallion.

The worst thing about all this is, hiding behind the formica and plastic is a proper, old-fashioned railway terminal which has been allowed to fall to pieces.  Head up the escalators and you'll find the original ticket hall.

This gorgeous Art Nouveau dome opens out onto the ugly highway, and is now used only for a small cafe named after the architect, Josef Fanta.  It's been allowed to decay and fall apart, and is positively heartbreaking.

The clocks are stopped, the ticket windows are closed; there's a doorway onto the platform that no-one uses now there's a gleaming subway from the Seventies extension underneath.  It feels like it's abandoned and lonely.

Weirdly it's not just curious train station fans and lost tourists who find their way up here.  Prague is in the process of building a railway line to the airport, but until then, there's an Airport Express bus every half hour - which departs from the porte-cochere entrance to this part of the station.  In other words, the city specifically sends foreign visitors up here to admire their inability to preserve this lovely building en route to and from the airport.  You have to admire their balls.

An Italian company was responsible for revamping the lower concourse, pumping the money in up front in exchange for collecting the rent for the next thirty years.  Apparently this part of the station is next to be refurbished, but there's a cynical part of me that wonders if it will happen.  In these "tough economic times", where's the money in making something beautiful just for the sake of it?  You can't cram any shops into here, and it's miles from the rest of the station.  I wonder if that phase will be put "on hold" for a bit (along with that mucky station roof).

I hope I'm wrong.  I hope the next time I visit - and Prague is definitely worth a second visit - Fanta's magnificent hall will be back to its best, not the depressing mess it currently is.

Cross Country

I lean back in my seat and the music swells up around me.  It's the soundtrack to Tomorrow Never Dies, David Arnold's brilliant score that I once saw described as "a dustbin clattering down an elevator shaft".  Which was a compliment.  Halfway through I realise I should be listening to Casino Royale, because of its sweeping train music and its Czech location filming, but I hate to stop an iPod playlist before it ends.

Berlin's behind us now.  We've passed out of the Hauptbahnhof and through the tunnels and out of the suburbs and into the flat dull landscape of Northern Germany.  It looks much like England; fields, cows, hedges, trees.  Level crossings in the middle of nowhere with a single car being held back for our passage.  It's all very familiar, very temperate Northern Europe, very Protestant.  The BF nods off.  I realise I'm staring out the window and not taking anything in.

If I'm honest, the train is a disappointment.  We're aboard the Hamburg-Budapest service, via Berlin, Dresden and our ultimate destination, Prague, taking the leisurely railway route instead of a boring aeroplane.  We treated ourselves to first class seats, for only a small extra, but it doesn't feel first class.  There are no complimentary snacks, no free wi-fi, not even a plug socket at our table.  The red and blue seats are comfortable, but not massively so.  It doesn't feel right, comparing Deutsche Bahn to Virgin and Virgin winning.  We've already had a minor contrempts with a Japanese tourist and his wife.  He'd staked out our table for himself by dropping his massive suitcase across the seats; I politely explained that we had reserved them, and showed him our ticket, causing him to shout down the train at his wife.  He spent the rest of the journey being ping-ponged round the carriage as passengers arrived to claim their reservations.  I began to wonder if he even had a ticket.

Tiny country stations glide past, with names full of umlauts.  The architecture is unremarkable.  In fact the main feature at most of them seems to be an astonishing amount of graffiti.  This seems to be the hallmark of Continental rail travel - it's almost as though they can't be bothered scrubbing it off after a while.  There are tags all over even the smallest piece of railway equipment.  Unless it's a massive pan-European version of Art on the Network.

We're seats 95 and 96.  Alongside us, in 93 and 94, are a young Australian couple with Eurorail passes.  She looks like Sarah Michelle Gellar and has had her head buried in a Kindle since Berlin (can you bury your head in a Kindle?  "She has had her nose pressed up against a Kindle since Berlin".  Needs more work).  He looks like Robbie Williams - disturbingly so - but has less patience than her.  To be fair, he's laid a pack of Strepsils out on the table in front of him, so he's clearly suffering.  (I got the early stirrings of a sore throat the next day; it was immediately christened "Antipodean Flu").  He also has a copy of Paul Theroux's Great Railway Bazaar, in the classic orange and white Penguin cover, but when he opens it to start reading it turns out he's only about ten pages in.  He gives up a few pages later.

Dresden station, when it comes, is magnificent.  I press up against the window so I can properly take in its huge glass roof and its ornate stonework.  Robbie Williams suddenly gets up and leaps off the train, leaving his girlfriend behind.  My anxiety levels rise with each minute.  I assume he's just nipped off for a cigarette or something, but what if he doesn't make it back?  What if the train takes off without him?  What do you say to an inconsolable Australian whose boyfriend is rapidly receding into the distance?  The passengers on the platform get thinner, and I see Deutsche Bahn men wandering around.  Surely we're about take off, and still no sign of him.  I find myself looking out for him, even though the girl seems utterly disinterested.  That's trust for you.  He reappears in the corridor, bringing pastries and bottles of Fanta.  She barely looks up.

Someone must have flicked the scenery switch at Dresden.  The ordinariness of the landscape vanishes and is replaced by something magical.  Now we're travelling through thickly forested mountains, rocky outcrops looming threateningly overhead, with the Elbe our constant companion.  The houses in the villages we pass are decorated with intricate carvings and roof ornaments and onion bulb domes.  A tributary empties into the river beneath a perilously thin bridge.  Mist clings to the tops, nature's soft-focus filter.  It's a landscape I've never experienced before, the coldly beautiful Central Europe.

Across the border, and we enter the Czech Republic at Děčín. The Deutsche Bahn train crew dismount and chatter on the platform while a portly guard in calf-length shorts waves us off. The Bf and I are clutching our passports, completely unfamiliar with the process of international rail travel.  The whole process seems so bizarre to our island minds - that a tiny little town like this can have Budapest on its destination board.  There's no frontier, no border guard, no immigration control.  My fantasy of recreating the end of Cabaret is sadly dashed.  The EU and the Schengen Agreement may have made travel much easier in Europe, but it's stripped it of some of the romance.  I've been abroad half a dozen times on my current passport and there isn't a single stamp in it.

Our third guard comes on the tannoy and welcomes us on behalf of Czech Railways.  The first was a neat woman with thin-framed glasses who made her announcements in German only.  The second, who boarded at Dresden, was a burly man with a sing-song voice that made him sound - and I realise this sounds unlikely - like a Teutonic Rastafarian.  He spoke English, German and Czech, and threw some freeloaders out of first class and into standard with undisguised glee.  I guessed that he was specifically here for the international portion, spending his days criss-crossing the border, because he gets off at Děčín and the Czech gets on.  He wouldn't look out of place on Merseyrail, with his yellow tie and belly poking out beneath his waistcoat.

The Australian man has taken out an expensive looking leather bound journal and is struggling to find something to write in it.  I imagine the pressure he must be under: crossing the globe, a once in a lifetime trip across Europe, and trying to boil it down into words.  Something for the grandkids to read in fifty years time.  I notice that the last entry is for Thursday and today is Sunday.  He rolls the pen round in his hand a few times, looks at his girlfriend for some kind of inspiration (she doesn't notice), then writes: Friday 16th September.  I realise it's not a journal, but a diary, and he's backdating his entries.  I'm quietly outraged - that's cheating!  Of course, I don't say anything.

In fact, we haven't said a word to each other the whole journey.  I'd been afraid, when I heard them talk as they sat down, that we'd have been in for a detailed run down of their international voyages the whole trip.  By the time we pulled into Prague station I pictured us swapping Facebook details and Christmas card details and hating them with an intense passion for ruining my trip.  Perhaps the iPod headphones have been a powerful deterrent.  If I was a proper travel writer, we'd have been swigging from a hip flask and sharing hilarious anecdotes before we'd left the Hauptbahnhof.  As it was, my shy/antisocial instincts were satisfied.  This is why I'm not a proper travel writer, just an idiot with a blog.

We're flowing into a U-shaped valley with the river at its base.  Through here, somehow, the Czechs have managed to squeeze railways, roads and narrow towns, a few streets wide.  The mist has developed into a thin drizzle, and the towns are all so spectacularly ugly, it feels like we're travelling through a black and white film.  Something with subtitles and a back street abortion.  Between the factories, though, you get more of that inspiring landscape, more of those green mountainsides and endless forests, so you can forgive it.  At Nelahozeves, the car fills with the smell of gas from the refineries.  I have to admit, it makes a nice change from the smell of dope I got a little while ago.  I get the feeling that down in Standard class there may be a bit of a party going on amongst the backpackers.

Robbie Williams decides to have another crack at Paul Theroux.  He lasts two pages this time, and folds down the corner of the page to mark his place.  I resist the urge to scream "use a bloody bookmark!" in his ear.

The tendrils of Prague itself start to wrap themselves around our train; the green starts to recede, replaced by concrete, and the stupidly ugly Communist blocks get even stupider and even uglier.  Of course, now that market forces are in charge, they're starting to fall apart as well, which makes them look worse.  We pass under and over highways, and the carriage slowly comes to life: the sleepers are roused, they stretch and yawn.  The tourists scramble at their suitcases in the overhead racks.  Creased coats are battered back into shape.  The Australian girl finally turns her Kindle off; I wonder what she was reading that carried her all the way through the six hour trip.

Into Prague railway station, and we leave the train, passing up the opportunity to take our complimentary DB Magazines with us.  The journey's over; it's time to explore another country.