Aeroexpress, the company that operates commuter train services from Moscow airports to the city, plans to introduce its first stopover for its trains. Starting Thursday morning, September 6, all trains traveling between Sheremetyevo Airport and Belorussky Railway Station will stop at the Okruzhnaya platform, where passengers will be able to transfer to a number of other transport lines, reports Travel.ru.
The service will remain the same: Aeroexpress trains will only operate to and from the airport; intracity travel is prohibited. Thus, it will be possible to travel from Okruzhnaya to Sheremetyevo and back (at standard or discounted Aeroexpress fares), but not between Okruzhnaya and Belorussky Station.
Departure from the Okruzhnaya is scheduled 13 minutes after the train's departure from Belorussky Station—that is, typically at 13 and 43 minutes past the hour. Travel time between the Okruzhnaya and Sheremetyevo varies depending on the service, typically between 21 and 24 minutes. The stopover at the Okruzhnaya is 30 seconds. Arrival and departure schedules at the terminal terminals remain unchanged by the addition of an intermediate stop.
From Okruzhnaya Station, you can transfer to three other rapid transit lines: the Lyublinsko-Dmitrovskaya metro line, the MCC's surface-level Circle Line (also known as Line 14), and the Savelovsky-direction commuter trains (their platform was recently relocated to facilitate transfers to other lines). Several bus and trolleybus routes also pass through or nearby. This will significantly simplify and speed up travel to Sheremetyevo for residents of many northern Moscow neighborhoods, as well as those living along the MCC and Lyublinsko-Dmitrovskaya Line.
Reports of Aeroexpress exploring the possibility of future stopovers on all three of its routes—to Domodedovo, Sheremetyevo, and Vnukovo—first surfaced in the summer of 2017. However, the carrier quickly denied any knowledge of the matter and asked media outlets that published the reports to "cancel" them.
However, as we see, these plans are now gradually becoming reality—albeit under the same veil of secrecy: news about the new stop and schedule changes is still absent from the company's website. Intermediate stops for Aeroexpress are a long-overdue solution, even though they were only considered after a significant decline in passenger traffic, which reached 30% in 2015-2016.
The situation with rail service to Moscow's airports is difficult to call normal precisely because two of the three airports only have express lines. Only Domodedovo has a regular commuter train—and that's only because it existed long before the Aeroexpress.
Meanwhile, residents of areas traversed by Aeroexpress lines often lack adequate transportation to their respective airports and are forced to take circuitous routes with transfers. This situation was particularly absurd on the Sheremetyevo line: passengers from northern Moscow could only reach the airport after a significant loss of time and along completely inadequate routes.
There are virtually no cases abroad where express rail service to airports is exclusively provided. Hong Kong Airport is perhaps the only such example, but there are also a dozen and a half bus routes serving almost all areas of the city, and an alternative regular MTR station is just a five-minute bus ride from the airport.
In the vast majority of cases abroad, regular trains or the metro run alongside the nonstop express train. Even more airports have no express train at all, and only trains with stops in various parts of the city.
Source: travel.ru