PRAGUE

The Prague metro is one of the most important means of transportation in the Czech capital. Around 40% of the traffic volume is handled underground. Every day, around one million passengers rush through the city’s tunnels on three lines, and we meet some of them in Prague’s METROCOSMOS.

So we follow the self-proclaimed “Sound Hunter” Charles Rose, who uses his contact microphones to show us what the escalators in the second deepest station in the EU, Náměstí Míru, sound like from the inside. The Frenchman now inspires over 2 million followers with his ASMR soundscapes on social media.

On the journey to the next story, we discover what is probably the fastest flip book in the world. A system of LED strips installed in the tunnel that turns the windows of the subway into a screen. We are allowed to look over the shoulders of employees of the young company “EUDI” in the tunnel as they calibrate their new prototype.

But it is not only advertising technology that is constantly evolving. The means of transport, which opened in 1974, has been undergoing continuous expansion and modernization measures ever since. We accompany the architect Anna Svarc on her journey through the construction site of a new subway line and gain exciting insights from tunnel to track construction. We discover the incredible world in which engineers and workers achieve the unimaginable.

Did you know that the tunnels in the Prague subway are also cleaned? We take you on a ride on the so-called Cleaning Train, which starts work after closing time and removes a layer of black metal dust from the tunnel walls every week.

However, you won’t notice any of this in the very clean and well-maintained passenger area of the Prague metro. While most passengers take their seats on the new or old trains, there are other, much more dangerous ways to get from A to B. We talk to two former trainsurfers who tell us what they loved about the illegal sport and, above all, why they quit the dangerous “hobby”.

Shortly before the station doors open for passengers in the morning, the “Explorer Train” makes a round of checks to ensure that there are no workers or illegal persons on the tracks. We travel with it on its journey through the empty subway system.

As in every episode, we also let the people who don’t notice any of this speak. We place the passengers at the center of the story. We find out why Prague is such a city worth living in and how it is constantly repositioning itself in the field of tension between past and present, East and West.