The metro they built without asking Moscow

On the morning of 13 November 1952, the Central Committee plenum debates three projects: rebuilding the cities, the socialist remaking of Bucharest and — third on the list — building the metro. All three pass. But the metro still needed one more approval, from outside the room.

The scale of the project demanded, writes the historian of the Bucharest City Museum, “consulting the Soviet counsellors in order to get their approval”. The answer came back curt: the project was rejected, “a premature aspiration of the Bucharest regime”. The reasoning cited the groundwater lying close to the surface, the seismic zone and the buildings hit by the 1940 earthquake — problems that supposedly required solutions “impossible for the socialist camp”.

The Soviet condition said everything about what kind of metro that would have been: stations 20–40 metres deep, doubling as wartime shelters, on the Moscow model. A metro too expensive to be possible for Romania's 1952 economy. So the metro was postponed — on paper a pause, in fact a twenty-year wait.

On 15 February 1972, in the meeting of the Executive Political Committee, Nicolae Ceaușescu decides on “naming a commission that would elaborate proposals concerning the development of public transportation in Bucharest, in particular by building transportation systems with electric means of great capacity and speed, as well as the construction of the subway”. Meanwhile the Titan–Balta Albă and Drumul Taberei–Militari estates had filled the city with people the trams could no longer hold.

The tone is set by the meeting of 17 January 1975, which approves the decree founding the Bucharest Metro enterprise. The transcript keeps Ceaușescu blunt: “I have seen the organisation problems, but I must tell you that everything has to be executed in the country, including the shields.” The shields — the machines that dig tunnels — were to be designed and cast in Romania.

Works start in April 1975, and the enterprise soon gathers specialists from railways, hydropower plants, mines and buried utilities — the people who already knew how to dig in Romania. But the deadlines are so tight that the design–prototype–test–redesign–series principle is simply abandoned: stages get “burned”.

The first buckets meet what everyone feared: muddy ground, heavy infiltration along the whole route. The soil had been investigated too little, and the shields — open-front, hand-dug — advanced through practically unknown ground, under old and vulnerable buildings, with too few skilled workers for such a job.

Groundwater remains the greatest problem: the strata change every few metres, and the pumps barely keep up. On one section the freezing of the groundwater is tried experimentally — an expensive, slow fix on a hurried site. Many techniques are applied “on the move”, against the clock, to catch the deadlines.

When outside help comes, it does not come from the East: Professor Herald Wagner, of the Hanover Technical University, visits the site and leaves one plain piece of advice — where hydrogeological studies are missing, drill probe boreholes and choose the fix case by case.

On 19 November 1979, the first metro train leaves Ciurel depot for Semănătoarea station, and the first passengers board from the platform. Three days earlier, on 16 November, the metro had been put into experimental service — with the public.

A whole month of trials with people in the cars follows — according to the Metrorex history, the only metro in the world tested this way. The official ribbon is cut on 19 December, and the reception report is signed on the 27th.

The first section measures 8.63 km and six stations: Semănătoarea, Grozăvești, Eroilor, Izvor, Piața Unirii, Timpuri Noi. The older history gives 8.1 km; 8.63 km is the length in the 2024 Metrorex report.