Off the rails in Bermuda

Agreed, the Trans-Siberian Railway and the Bermuda Railway are unidentical in scale. One traverses 6,000 miles of the least hospitable terrain in the world; the other tootles for 22 miles through a gently beautiful mid-Atlantic archipelago. Yet when it opened in 1931, Bermuda's line fulfilled the same purpose as Russia's: stretching across much of a nation and binding together communities unconnected by car.