Flora's Lift Shafts Break Through to the Platform, With the Lifts Themselves Still Eighteen Months Away

The step-free access being built at Flora on metro line A is now physically connected to the surface. DPP announced on 9 September that its contractors, STRABAG and OHLA ŽS, had completed the second of two planned breakthroughs, joining the newly mined spaces to the existing station. By coincidence it happened on Miners' Day.

The numbers put the work in proportion. Since tunnelling began on 4 December 2025 the contractors have sunk 30 metres of shafts and driven 60 metres of corridors, removing 3,900 cubic metres of rock and consuming 680 cubic metres of concrete mixes and 52 tonnes of steel reinforcement in securing what they excavated. The lifts themselves are expected to enter service at the end of February 2028 — roughly seventeen months after the hole was made.

The geometry of getting down there

Flora is a deep station and the solution is correspondingly indirect. The mined works consist of three shafts and a connecting corridor. The main lift shaft was sunk from the surface to a depth of 22.5 metres. From its foot, a horizontal corridor 60.3 metres long in plan runs to a point above the existing station. From there two short shafts were driven down into the central hall, entering the station's vault at a depth of 26.5 metres. One will carry the passenger lift; the other takes an escape and service staircase. The main shaft holds both a lift and stairs.

Completing the tunnelling, or rather the second of the two breakthroughs, is an important milestone for the project. Behind us is a technologically demanding stage in which we set up the site compound and progressively drove the whole cascade of shafts and the transfer corridor. The excavation proceeded in favourable geotechnical conditions, which had a fundamental influence on its trouble-free course. Mechanical rock breaking was effective, blasting was not needed. By finishing the tunnelling we now literally gain the space for the next phase of construction — carrying out the waterproofing and then the final lining.

— Jan Panuška, chief construction manager, STRABAG

Before any tunnelling started, buildings in the zone of influence were surveyed and a monitoring system installed to track deformation and other changes around the site. DPP says the favourable conditions meant no unexpected situations arose and the excavation had no substantial effect on the surrounding buildings — worth noting on Vinohradská, where the works sit under an inhabited street.

What follows, and what it leaves

Next come the waterproofing layers and then a final reinforced-concrete lining using 1,400 cubic metres of concrete. Only after that do the internal structures begin: staircases, landings, walls, the lifts and the complete technological fit-out.

When it is finished, Flora will offer step-free access to the platform directly from street level on Vinohradská, which is the substance of the thing. Jaromír Beránek, first deputy mayor for transport, framed it as correcting an inheritance.

We are putting right the mistakes of the past, when transport did not take account of accessibility for all groups of passengers. Flora will newly offer step-free access to the platform directly from street level on Vinohradská, and will make travelling easier for wheelchair users, but also for parents with prams or visitors to the Olšany cemeteries. Once the lift at Flora is in operation, only 12 of the 61 stations in the Prague metro network will remain without access for passengers in wheelchairs. As part of the reconstruction of further stations, it is a priority for us to make the remaining stations accessible as soon as possible. On the green line A accessibility is worst in the central section, so I am glad we are managing to find technical solutions even for its deep-level stations.

— Jaromír Beránek, first deputy mayor of Prague for transport

Twelve of sixty-one is the figure to hold onto. It is the count after Flora, not before it, and the stations still on the list are the ones line A runs through in the centre — the deep, awkward, 1970s boxes for which each solution has to be invented separately. Flora took nine months of tunnelling to connect a lift shaft to a platform 26.5 metres down, and it will take another year and a half before anyone rides in it. That is the actual unit cost of retrofitting accessibility into this network, and it is why the remaining twelve will not go quickly.