Subway car

London Underground Wagon in the Tunnel

Electric train 81-740.1 / 741.1 Rusich at the Volokolamskaya station

Inter-car barriers interfere with potential hookers who want to ride between subway cars. Also protect against accidental fall from the platform on the way.

Subway car - a type of rail rolling stock ( car ) designed for use on subway lines. Due to the nature of operation, subway cars have significant differences from cars and locomotives of conventional land railways. The vast majority of subway cars carry passengers , but there are also specialized cars: for household needs and freight.

As a rule, all metro cars are motorized , all modern metro cars use electric traction (with the exception of service cars, on which diesel can be used), steam and cable traction were also used in the past. Most subways in the world use a contact rail located to the side of the tracks or less often between the track rails, which allows reducing the size of the tunnels, although there are some exceptions: for example, the Shanghai metro uses the upper contact rail (above the roof of the car), and in Rome the upper contact rail the wire.

Metro cars are characterized primarily by the relatively small size of the rolling stock , which, in turn, is limited by the size of the tunnels , despite the fact that the latter should be as small as possible, which gives savings in the construction of the metro. So, the width of Soviet / Russian subway cars (types G , M5, D , E and their derivatives ) is 2686 mm, and the height is 3700 mm, and the width and height of the car of the electric train ER2 , respectively, 3480 mm and 5086 mm. At the same time, cars should have the greatest possible passenger capacity . Because of this, often designers abandon the traditional rectangular body structures, using convex, which more fully use the dimensions of the tunnels. Another feature of many metro cars is the increased number of doors compared to conventional electric trains and, as a result, fewer seats, which is primarily associated with the need for quick boarding and disembarking of passengers.

Usually the subways have the same gauge as the regular railway network, therefore the transportation of subway cars from the plant is usually carried out by rail as a part of trains, after which they are transferred to the subway through a gate .