Somtime in the eighties I travelled through the former USSR on the Trans Siberian Express. It was back in the says when Leningrad had not yet reverted to St Petersburg.
An interesting thing about the cities was the level of standardisation that the regime had brought about. One day, we got off the train in a city we did not know well with one of the "real" railway buffs. He said that we didn't need any directions. The number one tram would always go in a straight line along Lenin Street, so all you would have to do would be to get off, cross the road and get back on again. The number two tram would go in a circle, so if you stayed on the tram you would get back to where you started. In any of the smaller cities, go down Lenin Street, turn left into Karl Marx Street, left into Pushkin Street and left into Gorky Street to get back to where you started. His directions were really quite accurate and we never did get lost.
