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With City Day just around the corner, Mayor Yury Luzhkov followed his newly minted tradition and opened a new metro station, the city's 172nd.

The new station, Mezhdunarodnaya, is on the Filyovskaya (light-blue) line, and, in the near future, it will serve as a rail hub for express trains to two airports, Sheremetyevo and Vnukovo.

"We are in a good mood as we look to the future," Luzhkov told reporters in the station's marble-tiled lobby. "We are opening one metro station after the next. We have come through a difficult stage when we had hardly any money, but we didn't stop construction for a single day."

The mayor said he hoped the City Duma would approve 19 billion rubles ($710 million) for metro construction projects in 2007.

Moscow's newest metro station has a minimalist decor, with dark marble floors and escalators lit by protruding hammerhead lamps.

The opening ceremonies got under way Wednesday afternoon at the Delovoi Tsentr metro station, which was opened on the eve of City Day last year. A sparkling new train pulled in to whisk the mayor and journalists one stop down the line to the Mezhdunarodnaya station.

Sniffer dogs were taken through the cars before the mayor and the media were allowed to enter. Luzhkov, flanked by metro chief Dmitry Gayev, flashed the all-clear sign to the driver before the train departed.

The new trains on the Filyovskaya line are steely and have a futuristic look, with electronic signs displaying the name of approaching stations and a baffling 70s-style flashing graphic of the train's current location.

While the two-minute journey that the media took with Luzhkov was a smooth ride, later rides by reporters on the same line were interrupted by the trains screeching to a halt two or three times before reaching the next station.

The opening ceremony was preceded by a rousing performance by the legendary Oleg Lundstrem Orchestra, which blazed through jazz classics in a room above the platform at the Delovoi Tsentr station with around 200 invited guests before Luzhkov arrived.

Luzhkov and his entourage were played in by a violin rendition of "Rock Around the Clock."

Photographs showing the history of the metro lined the entrance hall of Delovoi Tsentr, and clarinet solos from a Dixieland jazz band echoed down the escalators.

Metro press secretary Pavel Sukharnikov confirmed the city's plans to build a second ring line outside the current ring. He said City Hall and metro officials would meet in September to draft plans for the project, which will be funded by the city and federal governments.

Sukharnikov said the new ring line would not form a complete circle like the present ring line. Instead, links would be built between existing stations on the system's radial lines.

He said plans were in their infancy and that the project's completion could be decades away.

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