It has not been running since Covid and what followed.
The timetable varied greatly but the most recent one took approximately 50 hours Moscow to Nice.
(Moscow to Paris was much faster and covered the entire journey in 38 hours.)

My personal pain point is South Yarra.

I can't agree with the findings of the 2015 report on the subject. Omitting it from the scope was a mistake.

Caulfield would actually be incredibly easy to fix.

Rebuilding Footscray as a cross-platform connection is next to impossible, its layout, more resemblant of a triangle, doesn't really allow for that.

Melbourne is so very 90s in a lot of ways!

(And I am saying this as a good thing!)

How slow is it going to be?

The alignment looks like something that should be able to move quite quickly provided the signal priority is there and properly designed. Is the latter not the case?

By far the easiest solution for the time being is to include all zone C REM stations into the zone B, which will untangle the use of Opus cards, and just live with this while the technical fix is coming up.

This may also have something to do with the fact that the Russian prefix 'pre-' has a wide range of meanings it conveys, including 'before', 'in front of', 'above', and 'over'.

(The way Russian uses prefixes is akin to how English uses prepositions after verbs, i.e. is meaning-definitive.)

The Russian word 'prestol' is rather extraordinary in its etymology, as it originally meant 'chair' or 'bench' in old Slavic, but at some point got adopted as both 'throne' and 'table'/'lectern' in the context of Christianity and amenities in a church.

Russian 'stool' (with [u:]) literally means chair.

'Sviatoy Prestol' would be the collective designation of the Pope and the Roman Curia in Russian language, although people would just refer to 'the Vatican' without too much diving into the complexities of the definitions.

Produced in 1989 and 1990, two original 81-717/81-714 trains still running in Sofia maintain their Soviet look, with very little change, if any.

(Interestingly, Sofia metro was only opened in 1998, long after the Soviet Union ceased to be!)

Image: Transphoto, by Darai
transphoto.ru/photo/1805750/

A somewhat similar experience is to travel on the last remaining Soviet 81-717/81-714 trains in Sofia, Bulgaria.
These won't last long: the new trains from Skoda are being supplied.

Image: Transphoto, by Dmitriy Romanenkov.
transphoto.ru/photo/2209733/

(The 1989 81-717 train is on the left)

The fleet of E* from M3 line in Budapest was modernised-meaning-replaced in Russia in 2017...2018—meaning they basically got back a lot of similar-bodied mildly-modern-ish sets.

The city of Tbilisi operates select remaining E* cars—which have been heavily modernised and are unrecognisable—as middle cars in 81-717 trains (which makes them the only city to ever do such a thing).

The original Soviet E* series are still working on Line 1 in Kharkiv and retain their green-blue livery.
A mildly modernised version is still common on Line 1 in Kyiv, with the middle cars having their driver cabs removed. (All original cars were only produced in unified design with a driver's cab.)

Various modifications of E* trains were also previously operated in Moscow (until 2020), Baku (until 2008), Budapest (until 2018), and Prague (till 1997).
Of these, Budapest has two heritage trains (6 and 4 cars), and Prague has one (3 cars).

This new body has been the same across all other modifications of E series throughout the years, and also largely inspired the most widely known 81-717/81-714 series.

The reason was that the shifted door position in the E series (on the left) wouldn't let them fit into the 'horizontal lift' deep-level 'closed-type' stations, as the platform doorway spacing there had been designed with the standard car layout in mind.

(Image to the right: Habr via TechInsider Ru)

A heritage train of two original E series in between two Em cars is preserved.

The original E series had an experimental door layout that had to be revised back to standard for Lines 2 and 3 in St.Petersburg resulting in Em/Ezh series.

Image: Transphoto, by 'NeVa'.
transphoto.org/photo/2207461/