MOSCOW, February 26. /TASS/. Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin and Russian Special Presidential Representative for Nature Protection Activities Sergey Ivanov took part in the opening of the first five stations of the Bolshaya Koltsevaya line (Large Circle Line) of Moscow Subway on Monday.

"This is one of the world’s largest subway lines," Sobyanin said at the opening ceremony. All the other stations of the Bolshaya Koltsevaya Line will be completed in the next four to five years, he said. He thanked the engineers for their hard work and handed city awards to some of them during the ceremony.

Thanks to these stations’ opening, the Moscow subway system now has 212 stations and the length of its lines totals 360 km. The Petrovsky Park, TsSKA, Khoroshevskaya, Shelepikha and Delovoy Tsentr were opened on the 10.5-km-long line.

Four will be interchange stations. So, it will be possible to change from Delovoy Tsentr (on the Bolshaya Koltsevaya line) to the identically named station of the Solntsevskaya line and Vystavochnaya (on the Filyovskaya line), while Shelepikha (on the Bolshaya Koltsevaya line) will become an interchange station from identically named station of the Moscow Central Circle line, and Khoroshevskaya will have a transfer point with Polezhayevskaya (on the Tagansko-Krasnopresnenskaya line). The interchange between the Petrovsky Park and Dinamo stations (on the Zamoskvoretskaya line) will be opened later, while work is underway to build a ramp there.

The future circle line will include the Petrovsky Park, TsSKA and Khoroshevskaya stations, whereas Shelepikha and Delovoy Tsentr will become its branches leading to the Moscow City complex. The opening of the first part of the Bolshaya Koltsevaya line is expected to provide better transport accessibility for five Moscow districts, where more than 480,000 citizens reside. Transport service will also be improved for such popular sites as the Moscow City business center, the Dinamo and TsSKA stadiums, and the Megasport sports palace.

The Bolshaya Koltsevaya line will be ranked 11th on the metro map. This number currently belongs to the Kakhovskaya line that was built almost half a century ago and will be included in the subway’s Bolshaya Koltsevaya line. The line will be about 67 km long after the end of the construction. It will have 18 transfer points with the operating subway lines, seven intersections with radial railway routes and two with the Bolshaya Koltsevaya line.