... is that he had declared a very simple, very strident position, and had not encountered the response before that his position did not actually line up with successful HSR lines elsewhere. With enough of an emotional investment in the argument, he was not going to abandon it just because reality got in the way.

The fact that we are talking about Pittsburgh, the largest city in the mountainous Appalachian region - and the fact that there are no similar mountains between Moscow and St. Petersburg, and that the terrain in between did not have a lot of urban development in Czar Peter's day - seemed to be total airport city, flying completely over his head. Ohio = Midwest = Flat, never mind the western foothills of the Appalachian.


I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.