Trans-Siberian Highway

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The Trans-Siberian Highway spans nearly the width of Russia. It stretches over 6500 miles (10,500 kilometers) from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok and is the longest roadway in a single country. The road remained largely unfinished up until early 2004, when Russian President Vladimir Putin symbolically opened it, with great swaths of forest separating major portions from one another. Even today, in some places, it is a modern paved highway with painted reflective lane-lines and in others, a single meandering, pockmarked, loose-gravel trail.

[edit] Myths

Due to the megalithic nature of the project it has spawned several legends about itself. For example an inexplicable semicircle is said to exist somewhere that breaks the straight line of a segment. The explanation would be that when Stalin used a ruler to mark where the highway should pass the pencil jumped over his finger and the engineers that were under threat to make the segment exactly as commanded did not deviate from the drawing.

The same myth exists about the Moscow-Saint Petersburg Railway, which is very straight but has a strange curve nicknamed "The Tsar's finger". The myth about the road maybe comes from the railway myth.