Baku Metro - History

History

During the final decades of the Russian Empire the port city of Baku became a large metropolis due to the discovery of Oil in the Caspian Sea. By the 1930s, it was the capital of the Azerbaijani SSR and the largest city in Soviet Transcaucasia. The first plans for a rapid-transit system date to the 1930s upon the adoption of a new general plan for the city development.

Having survived the Second World War without falling to the Germans, and even further becoming a strategic hub of the Caucasus, the population further increased past the one million mark, a legal requirement of Soviet law for allowing construction of a Metro system. In 1947 the Soviet Cabinet of Ministers issued a decree authorising its construction, which began in 1951. On November 6, 1967, Baku metro became the fifth rapid-transit system of the Soviet Union when the first 6.5 kilometers of track along with a depot were inaugurated, in honour of the fiftieth anniversary of the October Revolution.

Due to the unique landscape of the city, Baku Metro did not have the typical Soviet "triangle" layout of development, and instead had two elliptical lines which crossed over each other at the very centre of the city – the Baku Railway Terminal. Thus one line would begin at the southwestern end of the city, and cross on a northeastern axis to follow the residential districts on the northern edge of the city and then snake along to the southeastern and ultimately southern end. This was inaugurated in three stages: Ulduz (1970), Neftçilər (1972) with Ahmedli following in 1989 and Hazi Aslanov in 2002 finishing the first contour. In addition in 1979 a branch was opened to a station built in a depot, Bakmil.

The second line was to parallel the Caspian coast from Hazi Aslanov, through Baku's industrial districts before meeting the first line again at the same Railway Terminal, and then follow westwards, before turning north to join Baku's northwestern districts. To accelerate construction, a branch was opened from May 28 station to Khatai in 1968, and in 1976 in the opposite direction towards Nizami, thus the second and first line used the same station (May 28). This posed no serious problems initially, as the line was two stations long, but when in 1985 the second stage opened which now lengthened the line to 8 stations (Memar Ajemi), construction of a transfer was desperately needed.

In 1993, the first stage of the transfer station Jafar Jabbarli came in operation, but the end of the Soviet Union and the political unrest, military conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh and the financial collapse which followed effectively paralyzed any construction attempts in Baku. Furthermore during the 1990s two catastrophes took place: in March 19 and July 3, 1994, two terrorist attacks killed 27 and injured 91 people, and on October 28 of the following year a fire in a crowded train killed 289 and injured 265 others, which is the world's deadliest subway disaster.

Only in the late 1990s could construction restart and the first was the unfinished Hazi Aslanov station which was part-sponsored by the European Union. In the mid-2000th construction of the northern end of the second line, abandoned since 1994, was restarted with Nasimi opening in October 9, 2008.