The thing about “he made the trains run on time” is that train logistics are a powerful force! You will recall that the institution of consistent time zones was downstream of railroad scheduling. The state of Italy was formed relatively recently, replacing storied and powerful smaller countries of long tenure, and establishing enough central control to coordinate interregional networks was in fact significant.

Lately been thinking of the significance of the Berlin Airlift as America’s pitch to Germans: that they were organized, disciplined and drilled (not to mention well-supplied with men and materiel) enough to hold an air supply channel that even the famed Prussian military couldn’t at Stalingrad, in the service of keeping the civilian population part of the rich first-world consumer goods economy