, Line C|left station on
Line C station was named Czech Building of the Year in 1999. Although the Prague Metro system is relatively new, the idea of underground transport in Prague dates back many years. The first proposal to build a sub-surface railway was made by Ladislav Rott in 1898. He encouraged the city council to take advantage of the fact that parts of the central city were already being dug up for sewer work. Rott wanted them to start digging tunnels for the railway at the same time. However, the plan was denied by the city authorities. Another proposal in 1926, by
Bohumil Belada and
Vladimír List, was the first to use the term "Metro", and though it was not accepted either, it served as an impulse for moving towards a real solution of the rapidly developing transport in Prague. In the 1930s and 1940s, intensive projection and planning works took place, taking into account two possible solutions: an underground tramway (regular rolling stock going underground in the city centre, nowadays described as a "
premetro", "
Stadtbahn" or "subway-surface line") and a "true" metro having its own independent system of railways. After
World War II, all work was stopped due to the poor economic situation of the country, although the three lines, A, B and C, had been almost fully designed. In the early 1960s the concept of the sub-surface tramway was finally accepted and on 9 August 1967 the building of the first station (
Hlavní nádraží) started. However, in the same year, a substantial change in the concept came, as the government after criticism by architects and urban planners, subsequently supported by Soviet advisers, decided to build a true metro system instead of an underground tramway. Thus, during the first years, the construction continued while the whole project was conceptually transformed. During the construction of the metro, a Czech rolling stock manufacturer, ČKD Tatra Smíchov, was charged with designing the trains. Two prototype two-car units under the name R1 were constructed in 1970 and 1971 and were used for field testing. However, the then-Czechoslovak government decided instead to order the trains for the underground from the Soviet Union (which would soon become Ečs, part of the Soviet "E" series, standing for "E Czechoslovak"). The R1 rolling stock would later be scrapped in the 1980s, near the end of the Cold War. Regular service on the first section of Line C began on 9 May 1974 between Sokolovská (now
Florenc) and
Kačerov stations. In August 2002, the system suffered disastrous flooding that struck parts of
Bohemia and other areas in Central Europe (see
2002 European flood). 19 stations were flooded, causing a partial collapse of the transport system in Prague; the damage to the Metro has been estimated at approximately 7 billion
CZK (over US$225 million in exchange rate at that time). The affected sections of the Metro stayed out of service for several months; the last station (
Křižíkova, located in the most-damaged area – Karlín) reopened in March 2003. Small gold plates have been placed at some stations to show the highest water level of the flood. Service was suspended between: •
Radlická and
Kolbenova on Line B •
Malostranská and
Náměstí Míru on Line A •
Hlavní nádraží and
Nádraží Holešovice on Line C (before the extension to
Ládví in 2004 and to
Letňany in 2008) A number of stations were closed due to
flooding in June 2013. Replacement trams ran between
Dejvická and
Muzeum on Line A and
Českomoravská and
Smíchovské nádraží on Line B, and replacement buses between
Kobylisy and
Muzeum on Line C due to closed sections of the track. ==Extensions==