Many of you know that I live around the corner from Prague's oldest terminus station, Masarykovo Nádraží. I've written on here and elsewhere about the plan to create railway services between Prague Airport and the centre of town.
Prague isn't unique amongst European cities not having a train from the airport to the centre. Anyone who's flown to Dublin and then queued in traffic on the bus to town knows to allow an hour and a quarter for a ten kilometre journey which would take half the time out of rush hour. Prague isn't that bad - it's about the same distance, but because the trolleybus from the airport drops people at a Metro station, it takes the same sort of time to reach Wenceslas Square any time of day to what it does in Dublin off-peak.
So why are we bothering in Prague? The airport link in Prague isn't just about the airport (I'll come back to that), but the issue for the airport is the number of tourists, largely Americans, who pile into taxis rather than use public transport. Give people a direct airport link to town, and even the die-hard car drivers will use it.
As I said above, the airport link isn't just about a link to the airport. Kladno is a city of 70 000 people, 17km north west of Prague. A quarter of those people work in Prague, and most struggle into town on buses to the edge of Prague plus metro, or the antiquated single-line railway (think 'The Railway Children') with one 'fast' service (45 minutes for 17km, 23kph!) and two slow services an hour. Bus plus metro is quicker.
The project to provide trains to the airport improves the connectivity to Kladno as well. The service to the airport will run every ten minutes, improving the travel time from about 37 minutes to about 25 minutes. To Kladno, the number of trains per hour will double, but some will go via the airport. The fast time will reduce from 45 minutes to 30 minutes.
Here's a picture showing the route of the project.
The original scope was to finish the station by mid-2027 and the entire project by 2030. 2030 was always optimistic. We saw the first part - Bubny to Výstaviště - open pretty much on time last year (see here). All was going well at the station until about November last year, with about half of the new roof being in place. The photo below shows the boundary between the railway as it was last month and what has been built so far.
The new roof is being held up by a temporary steel tower. What on earth is happening here?
My first instinct was that there is an upright missing. Surely no-one could make such a fundamental mistake on a nationally visible project?
Well, yes they could. I found this with the help of Claude. To quote the article when translated:
During the work, it was discovered that the project was being built according to a poorly calculated design. That is, the roofed and walk-through concrete platform above the tracks, which will connect Na Florenci, Hybernská and Opletalova streets, is probably not sufficiently supported and could collapse.
So, missing pile and support. The company doing the design and build - Sudop Praha - are responsible for fixing the issue, so the impact is delay rather than increased cost. But the equipment which put in the piles was huge - several metre tall cranes knocking long sections into the ground. The exact size isn't that relevant here; what is relevant is that none of it is going to fit under the concrete platform. I'm told that specialist equipment does exist for piling in a constrained environment: we shall see how they tackle it.
Work had practically stopped for about seven months when this update landed. At about the same time, we saw this on Instagram. To summarise:
The project is entering its most demanding construction phase. Trains from the north and west will terminate at Bubny from 1 June until December this year. This will allow archaeologists on to the site near Hybernská.
So they are going to fix the missing pile and column, but what's this about archaeology? When I first read it, I didn't think too much of it - all cities are likely to have archaeology under the surface. But it became pretty clear that there is extensive archaeology under the station: see the picture below.
This led me down an interesting route. Here's a map so you can see what I'm talking about.
The archaeology is roughly where I've drawn the dot on the map, but there are two clues on the map. The building in the background of the picture with the archaeology is the Cloud One Hotel. It was opened in 2024. Also, by the dot, there's a mention of a new road U Horské Brány - By The Mountain Gate. So I wondered what had been found during the building of The Cloud One. It didn't take me long to find this article. Here's a picture from it.
At this point, steam started coming out of my ears. Given what was known, why not start earlier on the archaeological dig? At this corner of the station, there's just the single car hourly S34 service to Čakovice. It can be terminated at Vysočany. Why on earth would you wait until now to bring in the archaeologists when it could have been done at the start of the project. Maybe someone knows that this archaeology doesn't extend beyond platform 1 (counting is from Hybernská), but why accept a risk like this?
Work is also ongoing renovating the part of the station near platform 1, as is shown below from Hybernská. Whether this causes a need to close platform 1 I don't know.
Roll forward to 1 June 2026, and I notice that platforms 1-3 are closed, with only platforms 4-5 left open. It's worth noting that they can't use anything below the concrete canopy until the new pile and column have been put in place, and the structure signed off as safe. So, in theory, one risk has been mitigated (provided that the archaeology does not go beyond platform 3, it won't cause further delays, unless it causes design changes), but one not (the place where the new pile is going is just as close to the operational railway as when I took the original picture - is the boring of the new pile being delayed?)
Finally, roll forward to yesterday, 6 June 2026. A worker was disassembling the support column, so we should expect work on the new pile to start soon.
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