What actually happened was that the road was laid out by engineers and he endorsed their advice to build in a straight line. The curve, also called the Verebinsky bypass, was actually built in 1877, 26 years after the line came into being, to circumvent a steep gradient that lasted for 17 km. Heading for St Petersburg, trains would pick up so much speed that they steamed straight past the next station, while those heading for Moscow needed four locomotives to get up the hill. In 2001, the bypass was closed as a new viaduct had been opened.