OREANDA-NEWS. August 12, 2009. The goal of the project is to increase the speed of passenger trains between Moscow and Nizhny Novgorod and reduce travel time to just 3 hours 55 minutes, a significant cut in the current time of at least 5 hours and 17 minutes, although this also takes into account changes in the timetable due to the reconstruction work along the route. The project began in 2006 and is due to be completed in 2010, reported the press-centre of Russian Railways.

In 2009, the Company plans to commission 9 redeveloped stations, 4 reconstructed traction substations, lay 24.6 km of track, install 123 sets of electric centralized points, equip 81 km of track with automatic blocking systems, upgrade 70 km of the contact network, reconstruct 39 passenger platforms, build a fence along the Petushka - Vyaznika stretch and rehabilitate the track on various stretches on Moscow and Gorky Railways. Work on these measures was started in IH 2009.

Since work on the project commenced in 2006, Russian Railways has commissioned 6 reconstructed stations (Kosterevo, Boldino, Koloksha, Terekhovitsy, Mstera, Senkovo), 3 traction substations (Boldino, Undol and Koloksha), an automatic blocking system on 26 km of 3 station-to-station blocks, laid 16.4 km of station track, installed 77 sets of electric centralized points, rebuilt almost 48 km of the contact network and built 12 new passenger platforms and other infrastructure.