Historian: The metro was originally supposed to run through the center of the highway and cross bridges

The first proposal for the construction of underground railway tracks was submitted in 1926 by Vladimír List and Bohumil Belada under the name “Underground high-speed railway for Prague”.

“This pair was really the first to present a serious technical study,” states Robert Mara. According to him, however, the “Prague underground” was talked about in the metropolis much earlier.

The idea was first formulated by Prague businessman Ladislav Rott. He wrote a letter to the city council on June 2, 1898, where he mentioned the underground railway. “That letter still exists in the archives of the transit company and is considered to be the symbolic beginning of the subway idea.”

The same transition triangle

What is interesting is the fact that Belada and List presented a proposal in 1926 that included the same “transfer triangle” that the Prague subway has today. “Originally, it was the triangle Můstek – Museum – Masaryk station. It was then replaced by Florenc, originally Sokolovská. Originally, the station was supposed to be directly from Masaryk station and had exits both to the Florence area, to Těšnov, and to the Masaryk station area.”

It could therefore be said that a system was invented 100 years ago that is still functional today. “All possible alternatives were explored, but the fact is that with the way public transport worked and what the preferred and busiest traffic streams were in the electric railway network, basically every potential developer was drawn to these directions.”

“If we take today’s route A, it was basically tram line 11, which was the backbone supporting line. And boy, that was line 5. They also had at their disposal the first sophisticated, scientifically processed transport survey, which took place as early as 1927. And there they really got hard data on how public transport is worth,” says Mara.

Metro on the highway and on the bridges

As in the 1960s and 1970s, three key problems were solved 100 years ago: how to cross the Vltava, how to bridge the Nuselská údolí and how to deal with the area of ​​today’s Masaryk station.

“In the case of Masaryk station, it was really a big traffic engineering problem. It was decided whether to go over the hill, i.e. via a bridge, or through a tunnel. The controversy lasted there until the beginning of the 1960s,” the historian explains, adding that in the event of a bridge there, there was originally supposed to be another central lane for the tracks next to the four currents of today’s “highway”.

“There was also an interesting development in the case of crossing the river. The creators were afraid of the river, and mainly of high investment costs. So in many projects you will find, for example, the Čechův most, which was supposed to be used for the expressway. So is the Jirásk bridge,” continues Mara.

So the subway would come out of the tunnel to the surface before the bridge and go underground again after the bridge. “It would probably change Prague a lot for the worse, and I think that this eventually led to the fact that in newer projects work was done exclusively with tunnel variants.”

The cover was not taken into account

Then in the 1960s and 1970s, when the metro began to be built, many houses fell victim to it. “It’s also because it was at a time when a number of nineteenth-century houses that we would consider interesting today were worthless at the time, it was considered second-rate construction,” says Mara.

“And also the ownership system at the time did not allow the fund to be taken care of in any way. Today, every house has its owner, care is being taken, but at that time housing estates were being built and there were no means, no resources, for any retro-modernization of the older stock,” says Mara.

According to him, certain groups of people also perceived it as progress. “That is, when old buildings are torn down and something new is built in their place. Typically: for example, the intersection on Anděl, where there were huge demolitions. Or on Národní trída.”

And was the subway considered a cover from the beginning? “Initially it wasn’t planned that way,” says the historian. This also corresponds to the original plan, according to which it was not supposed to be a subway, but an underground tram. According to him, the cover only started to be discussed in 1969, when it was already clear that the idea of ​​an underground tram would not be implemented.

Why was an underground tram originally considered? How difficult was it to stamp the first routes? How did the engineers deal with the tunnels under the river? And what was it like with the first subway cars? Did the Soviet Union impose them on Czechoslovakia? Or, on the contrary, have the Russians pulled a thorn from our heel? And what about Czech cars? Robert Mara from the Archive of the Transport Company of the Capital City of Prague also spoke about this in Rozstřel.