Politekhnicheskaya

The station is named after the nearby Polytechnic Institute. Although now all these institutions proudly called themselves universities. The Leningrad Institute of Physics and Technology, the famous Phys Tech, is also nearby.

Initially, it was a station with normal white lighting. One of the first two single-line trains in the USSR metro, the second is the neighboring station Ploschad Muzhestva. It was the success of these two stations that launched the single-line project in Leningrad and Moscow.

But then something went wrong. In 2003, the white lighting at the station was replaced with a vile yellow-mercury one.

Under white lighting, the station's materials played beautifully in different shades. Well, now everything is the same.

Of course, you can grumble that you just need to set the white balance when taking photos. And I will answer that I specifically keep the same color balance for all stations. In this case, to show how disgusting yellow sodium lighting is.

Before, when mice were still bees, the station hall was completely empty. Just like an underground football field. In reality, I always felt like a frog in a football in it. There was simply nothing for the eye to cling to. It's kind of creepy to think that there are dozens of meters of dirt mixed with quicksand at the top.

To this feeling, you need to add an empty and meaningless end of the station hall. A gaping architectural void.

One of the cameras even periodically broke down and reset the manually set mode in favor of the "kosher" automatic color alignment.

The name of the station is also very difficult to read in the yellow light, the letters are too dark. It returns to normal only if you allow the automation to align the colors (photo on the right).

But there are interesting lights above the tracks on the sides of the hall.

But the main feature of the station is not visible from the platform. In the direction of the neighboring station Akademicheskaya two branches branch out from the main tunnels. This is the foundation for the construction of another line with stations Сосновка (проект)ru, Проспект Культуры (проект)ru and Бугры (проект)ru.

Now these branches are without rails and are used as underground storerooms. The now-defunct digger site writes the following about this:

If you take the train towards the station Akademicheskaya or back, you can see through the window tunnels going off to the side, and without rails. ... After passing through the tunnel from the station, we came just to the fork of the working and spare tunnel, where we saw some kind of shed with a sign on the door "Plot 510". We went through the emergency tunnel and saw a staircase with concrete steps.

We decided to go there a little later and went straight. After about 15 meters, there was a concrete wall. There was a malfunction in the middle of this tunnel, from which you can safely look into the working tunnel. Then we decided to explore the second tunnel. To do this, we had to go to another working tunnel, and then go to the end of the spare one. But there's nothing interesting there either-just a storeroom, number 15.

Here is a diagram of this place (from the same site, click on the picture to view it large):

Well. Let's go upstairs. The hermetic door in front of the escalators is a traditional, vertical type - "guillotine":

Escalators are ordinary, nothing special.

The lobby is made by a detached building, quite in the style of its era.

Initially, the lobby had glazing all the way to the ground, but around 2010 the lower two meters of the walls were bricked up and lined with stone.

As it is, nothing special.

Let's go back down. There are no decorations above the escalator. But there are traces of plants on the balcony - like the station Vyborgskaya, where they are directly above the escalator.

There are a lot of streaks on the walls of the inclined passage. It is recalled that during its excavation in Cambrian clays at a depth of 16 meters, an ancient horizontal underground mine was discovered. At a section of 50 meters of intersection with an inclined course, the mine was artificially collapsed for safety reasons.

At the end of the escalator, the lights in front of the hermetic door become clearly visible.

There are quite a few manholes on the platform. And in the photo on the right is the stop point of the first car. If you look closely, there is a triangle in front of him about 10 meters away - the starting point of braking. And if you look even more closely, you can see the control marks for the train automation.

Well, from the media. The filming of an episode of the film "Day Watch" took place at the station. It didn't help at the station. Perhaps the most stupid station in the entire Saint-Petersburg metro.