Back to my journey across Russia, I’m really glad I chose this plane, whatever it is. I just went through the list and chose the one with the highest speed that wasn’t an airliner. I’ve found the ideal altitude to be around 2000 feet. That’s high enough that I get a bird’s eye view of everything and get to enjoy the scenery, and low enough that I can see details of the towns and cities beneath me. The speed can be a little high for when I’m passing cities, but if I was going any slower than 250 mph, I think I’d get impatient and be tempted by time compression. At 250, I haven’t been tempted even once yet. There’s always something interesting to see.
One theory I’ve conjured out of thin air, just purely based on observation of this railroad across Russia is that Russian engineers, when they built this railroad, really didn’t want to build bridges. I’ve cross a total of one bridge so far on this journey from Moscow past Strizhi. Every time my journey East brings me to a river, like Volga river, which is huge at certain points, the railroad goes around, never over the river. It’s like they knew the river was going to turn north further up ahead anyway, so why build bridges when you didn’t have to? Just turn the railroad directly south sometimes, and go around the river.
Of course, you can see the exceptions to that statement in that screenshot. When they cross the little tiny rivers, sure, they build little tiny bridges to cross over those. Probably much easier to build than crossing the Volga.