In
2004 the first high bridge that doesn't need to be drawn, a 2,824-meter
(9,265 ft) long Big Obukhovsky Bridge, was opened. Meteor hydrofoils
link the city centre to the coastal towns of Kronstadt, Lomonosov,
Petergof, Sestroretsk, and Zelenogorsk from May through October.
Throughout the city, smaller boats and water-taxis maneuver the many
canals in the warmer months.
The shipping company St Peter Line
operates two ferries which sails from Helsinki to St. Petersburg and
from Stockholm to St Petersburg.
Railways
The Sapsan high-speed train runs between Nizhny Novgorod, Moscow and Saint Petersburg
Vitebsky Rail Terminal
Today,
the city is the final destination of a web of intercity and suburban
railways, served by five different railway terminals (Baltiysky,
Finlyandsky,Ladozhsky, Moskovsky, and Vitebsky), as well as dozens of
non-terminal railway stations within the federal subject. Saint
Petersburg has international railway connections to Helsinki, Finland,
Berlin, Germany, and all former republics of the USSR. The Helsinki
railway was built in 1870, 443 kilometers (275 mi), commutes three times
a day, in a journey lasting about three and a half hours with the new
Allegro train.
The Moscow-Saint Petersburg Railway opened in 1851,
651 kilometers (405 mi); the commute to Moscow now requires from three
and a half to nine hours.
In 2009 Russian Railways launched a high
speed service on the Moscow-Saint Petersburg route. The new train, known
as Sapsan, is a deriative of the popular Siemens Velaro train; various
versions of which are already in service in a number of European
countries. It set records for the fastest train in Russia on May 2,
2009, travelling at 281 km/h and on May 7, 2009, traveling at 290
kilometers per hour (180 mph).
Since December 12, 2010 Karelian
Trains, a joint venture between Russian Railways and VR (Finnish
Railways),
