Poland Boring Ahead With Subway Project Despite Derailed Economy

Deep below downtown Warsaw lies a wine cellar that is the only trace of the city’s first attempt to build a subway.

Started in 1951, the subway was planned with Soviet help and designed to double as a shelter in case of nuclear war. After two years, it was abandoned. Authorities said there were geological problems, but in fact there was no more money.

“It was too expensive,” said Tadeusz Romanowski, whose first job out of college was to help prepare the drawings for that ill-fated project. “The economic situation was awful, so they stopped.”

Poland’s economic situation is still troubled today, but the government is funneling billions of zlotys into Metroprojekt, a new effort to turn the subway dream into reality. Romanowski is the new project’s construction manager.

Reality may take longer than expected. Poland has been forced to cut back on spending for the showcase project, as it has been forced to cut back on the construction of badly needed housing and other projects.

But work on the subway, which began in 1983, is going ahead despite weeks of bitter cold. Most of the work is underground, where teams of workers labor around the clock on tunnels.

“Take us with you to Los Angeles,” foreman Jan Kleszyk shouted to a visitor, with a laugh. “We’re ready to go, the whole brigade.”

Kleszyk’s team of eight miners from the coal region of Silesia in southern Poland were at work at the far end of a 340-yard-long tunnel, using compressed air to push a steel-edged cutting disc through the damp, sandy soil.

As the disc moved forward with a deep, throbbing whine, the soft gray earth fell away, and miners shoveled it into the wagons of an electric-powered train that would carry it to the surface.

Later, construction workers would line the new section of tunnel with curved, cast-iron plates and inject liquid concrete through holes in the plates to seal the walls against water.

“We work on a lot of projects, but this is certainly exciting in its way,” said Kleszyk, 33, who wore a torn sweater, orange hard hat, gray work pants and black rubber boots. There was no need for warmer clothing because steam pipes brought in heat from the entrance shaft.

“This is completely new for us,” he said. “It’s the first work of its kind in Poland.”

Although ground was broken four years ago, the subway became a factor in daily life only last fall, when Aleje Niepodleglosci, a major thoroughfare, was closed to traffic for several miles.

Signs warning of objazdy (detours) now take motorists miles out of their way, and Ulica Marszalkowska, the city’s busiest north-south avenue, is more jammed than ever with buses, streetcars and private automobiles.

“This will take until the millennium,” one resident grumbled.

Some people in Warsaw see political reasons for the decision to go ahead with the massive project.

“(Polish leader Wojciech) Jaruzelski would rather be remembered as the father of the metro than as the guy who stifled Solidarity,” one said, referring to the outlawed free labor union movement.

But the authorities insist that the subway is an absolute must because traffic congestion is becoming impossible in the city. Warsaw’s population has grown to more than 1.7 million since the city was virtually destroyed in World War II.

As with Metro Rail in Los Angeles, which also has had funding problems, the dream of Metroprojekt goes back to the 1920s. Both projects may well be inaugurated 70 years or more after they were proposed.

The present Warsaw project has fallen behind schedule, largely because of sharp cuts in the money promised in the latest five-year plan. Paradoxically, the money actually spent on the metro this year is expected to total more than 15 billion zlotys, compared to 11 billion in 1986. The official exchange rate is 197 zlotys to the dollar.

Planners explained the increase by saying that they want to accomplish as much as they can early in the five-year cycle, which began last year. Since the plan is flexible and adjusted yearly, they hope to get more money once they get a good start on the second leg of the subway.

“This five-year plan is known as the plan of frustration,” a Western diplomat said. “Everybody is fighting for their piece of the pie, and it’s a shrinking pie.”

For now, plans to employ 3,000 workers in two shifts have been cut back to 1,500 workers and one shift, except for the 50-foot-deep tunnel, where miners are working three shifts a day.

Completion of the first leg is expected in 1992 instead of 1990, as originally promised, with the entire line expected to be in operation by the middle of the next decade, at least one year late.

Three more lines have been proposed, but the government has yet to decide whether they will be funded.

Despite the delays, Romanowski, the construction manager, is determined that the latest effort will result in more than an underground storage place for wine.

Rapid Transit Indispensable

Rapid transit is indispensable, he said. Already the area to be served by the subway has 700,000 residents, almost half of the city’s growing population. An average of 50 streetcars and 150 buses an hour clog the major north-south streets, carrying more than 17,000 passengers an hour.

The discomfort factor soars as high as 10 passengers per square yard during rush hours, studies have found, and the total number of passengers per hour is expected to almost double by 1990.

“We must proceed, because we expect that without the metro, traffic will just be blocked all the time,” Romanowski said. “There is no other solution. We just have to build it.”

Plans call for 23 stations along 14 miles of underground track. The Los Angeles subway line is expected to have 17 stations along its 18.6-mile route.

Soviet-built trains, expected to travel as fast as 68 m.p.h., will link the mushrooming bedroom suburbs south of Warsaw with the city center and the sprawling Huta Warszawa steelworks north of town.

The Warsaw subway is modeled on the time-tested Soviet subway system, much of which was built in the 1930s. Six-car trains are expected to leave at 90-second intervals and carry peak loads of 40,000 passengers an hour, about 200 million passengers a year.

In addition to technical advice, the Soviets are giving Poland 90 of the system’s eventual total of 360 cars, along with station ventilators, drills and other equipment.

Most of the track will be just under 10 yards below the surface. Construction for the most part will consist of reinforced-concrete covered trench, but four stations in the center of town are to be linked by tunnels.

So far there have been no serious accidents, Romanowski said, knocking on a wooden table for luck as he said it.

He dismissed as absurd a rumor to the effect that the subway is proceeding at the pace of an inch and a half a month. Actually, the rate is more like 60 yards a month.