In the past ten years or so in the Dachu Empire, the development of railways can be said to be rapid, with a large number of railway lines being built and opened to traffic almost every year.

Its development speed is more exaggerated than the historical railway development in Britain and even the United States.

Before the 21st year of Chengshun, the railway development in the Dachu Empire was very weak. It was basically limited to old wrought iron railways. They were mainly used for mining area railways and port railways. They used horse-drawn carriages instead of trains.

However, this fee is relative... Because the Da Chu Empire had a huge territory and a large population. Even if the railway development at that time was very weak, in fact, the number of mining areas and port railways combined could reach thousands of kilometers.

Among them, the famous Songjiang Railway, a passenger and freight railway with a total mileage of more than 30 kilometers, was developed during this period.

When this railway was originally designed and built, this railway was used to run horse-drawn carriages...not trains. Its rails were not the steel rails that were later adopted on a large scale, but were made of mild steel.

Mild steel was a trade-off between wrought iron and low-carbon steel that the Chu Empire made due to limitations in smelting technology and imperfect processing technology. The carbon content used was slightly higher than

Wrought iron, but a type of steel lower than later generations of low carbon steel...

The hardness, wear resistance and other properties are not as good as low carbon steel in the traditional sense, but better than wrought iron.

The toughness is higher than low carbon steel and weaker than wrought iron.

This thing is actually between wrought iron and low carbon steel. It is called mild steel within the Da Chu Empire. It is the result of the Da Chu Empire trying to improve the material performance and processing performance as much as possible under limited technical conditions.<

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In Chengshun's more than ten years and even twenty years ago, it was widely used in various industries such as railways, ships, and mechanical processing.

Early railways and ships were basically built using this kind of mild steel.

Songjiang Railway too!

It's just that when this railway was built, it happened to coincide with the successful development of high-pressure steam engines, and then the train appeared, which was the Guangzhou Machinery Company's Type 21 train.

Therefore, when the Songjiang Railway was completed and put into operation, it used trains instead of horse-drawn carriages.

But...it cannot be denied that this railway was designed from the beginning to run horse-drawn carriages!

Chengshun The development of the Dachu Empire's railways 21 years ago was mainly based on mining areas and port railways, and focused on short-distance and large-scale cargo transportation.

In addition, there is actually a kind of rail carriage in urban areas... Rail carriages are still an important urban means of transportation in many big cities to this day, but traditionally it is not easy to classify this kind of rail transportation into railways.

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Twenty-one years after Chengshun, because the Guangzhou Machinery Company successfully developed the Type 21 train, its subsequent operation on the Songjiang Railway achieved great commercial success.

At the same time, during this period, the Chu Empire also successively developed large-scale mass production technology, casting technology, and processing technology for steel. Major steel companies successively launched various steel rails.

The service life of this new type of rail is ten to twenty times longer than that of early wrought iron, and several times higher than that of mild steel. At the same time, although the cost has increased, it is still within an acceptable range...

After all, after the large-scale mass production process of steel has been improved, whether it is low carbon steel or high carbon steel, that is, a little more carbon content, there is actually not much difference in production costs for steel plants.

In addition, the most important point is that after twenty years of early industrial development, the productivity of the Chu Empire has been greatly improved, and the demand for transportation is also very urgent.

The huge population flow, the huge demand for material transportation, coupled with the successful research and development of the Type 21 train and the breakthrough in rail technology, combined directly promoted the development of railways.

Starting from the 21st year of Chengshun, the Chu Empire began to rapidly build railways at a scale of thousands of kilometers per year.

In the early days, it was mainly concentrated in plain areas and economically developed areas where it was easy to build railways. In the middle period, war-ready railways were added. Now, with the further development of construction technology, the Chu Empire has also begun to build railways in complex terrains such as mountainous areas.
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As of today, the 33rd year of Chengshun, the Chu Empire has built a total of 40,000 kilometers of railways, which is a quite terrifying number.

The main main line railways that have been built include Jinpu Line (Tianjin, Hebei to Pukou of Jinling), Guanghu Line (Hukou of Jiangxi to Guangzhou, Guangdong), and Jiangnan Railway (Ningbo of Zhejiang to Hukou of Jiangxi, including the branch line from Hangzhou to Jinling via Huzhou).

Hailan Line (Jiangbei Haizhou to Gansu Lanzhou), Northwest Railway (Gansu Lanzhou to Turpan Yinning), Central Asia Railway (Turpan Yinning to Lianghe Province Turcheng), these three railway lines are actually a whole east-west railway line.

Railway, therefore it is also called the East-West Railway.

Youhan Line (from Youzhou, Hebei to Hankou, Hantianfu), Nanheng Line (from Nanchang, Jiangxi to Hengyang, southern Chu, and continues to extend westward into Guizhou, is part of the Southwest Railway)

Liaodong Railway (Tianjin, Hebei to Shenyang, Liaodong), East China Sea Railway (Shenyang, Liaodong to Busan, East China Sea), Liaobei Railway (Shenyang, Liaodong to Heishui Shuangjiang)

Jiaotai Line (Jiaozhou Bay, Shandong to Taiyuan, Shanxi).

These major railway trunk lines, such as the Fujian Railway, Guangxi Railway, Xining Railway, etc., plus several major railway branch lines, basically connect all the provinces in the hinterland of the Chu Empire.

Well, in addition to the four provinces of Yunnan, Sichuan and Liangkang, the railways in Yunnan and Sichuan are also under construction. It is estimated that they will be completed and opened to traffic soon. By then, only the Liangkang area will be inaccessible to trains.

These main railway lines mean that a Chu nationality can take a train from the southernmost province of Thang Long to the northernmost province of Heishui. In the future, he can also reach the city of Chur on the shores of Lake Baikal via the grassland railway.
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At the same time, there are a large number of various railway branch lines, connecting many prefectures and counties, especially in the east and some economically developed areas in the south, such as Guangdong, Zhejiang, Jiangnan and other provinces. Not to mention every county, but basically every county

Every city has train access.

These railway networks formed the blood vessels for the local economic operation of the Great Chu Empire, continuously transporting people and various materials, providing various nutrients for the huge empire of the Great Chu Empire.

At the same time, it also brought a new life to the vast number of people in the empire!

Through these railways, even people in some remote places can easily go to other places to work and live, and many local specialty products can be easily transported to economically developed areas.

The large-scale construction of railways not only drives the development of the empire's economy at a furious pace because of its large-scale infrastructure, but also brings strong economic vitality along the railway lines.

The large-scale development of railways even directly gave birth to many large cities with railway hubs, and even changed the structure of some parts of the Chu Empire.

Such as Xuzhou, this place used to be like that, but now because it is located at a railway transportation hub, it has directly become a newly developed industrial city in the Chu Empire, and has also become the new provincial capital of Jiangbei Province.

The same goes for Zhengzhou. Because of the Yellow River Bridge, Zhengzhou has become a railway hub in the Central Plains region, and its ultimate development speed far exceeded that of Luoyang next door. Now the governor of Henan Province has moved from Luoyang to Zhengzhou.

The same goes for the decline of Anqing and the rise of Luzhou. Anqing used to be the capital of Anlu Province, but in fact its development has not been very good. The main reason is that the terrain there is limited, and it seems to be on the edge of the Yangtze River, but in fact

The port throughput is not large.

It does have good military defense functions and a strong historical background...but these two points are of little use in the past 20 to 30 years of the empire's rapid development.

With the railway construction in Anlu Province kicking off, Luzhou-Hefei Line has become an important cross-rail hub in Anlu Province. It can reach Jingshi Pukou in the east, Lu'an in the west, and continue to

It reaches Xinyang in the west and is connected to the railway networks of Huguang and Henan.

You can reach Bengbu to the north, and Anqing to the south.

This unique cross-railway hub status directly boosted the economic development of Luzhou and Hefei. It also became the most important industrial city in the Anlu area of ​​the Chu Empire. It was the second largest industrial city in the Pan-Jiangbei region after Xuzhou.

A rapidly rising industrial city.

As a result, the capital of Anlu Province was also moved to Hefei County, Luzhou.

Xuzhou, Zhengzhou, and Luzhou have become big winners in economic development due to the construction of railways, and have become the new capitals of their provinces.

There are many similar examples, not only in provincial capitals, but also in prefectural and county governments.

The original capital or county seat of many prefectures and counties was in other places, but because the railway line did not pass through the original capital or county seat, the capital or county seat was then relocated to the railway line.

Of course, this is also because the railway construction capabilities of the Dachu Empire are still a bit poor, so when building railways, the priority is the difficulty of construction. It will not be said that because your capital is in a mountainous area, the railway line will specially go around you.

In the ravines.

Local officials in local prefectures and counties do not have enough political energy to influence railway lines, especially the direction of trunk railways, so most of the time the local government accommodates railway lines.

From this we can see that around each railway line and each railway station, a large-scale urban construction took place in the Chu Empire.

Many cities, even provincial capitals, are actually newly built, not to mention those small counties, small prefectures and the like.

The new county towns in some counties were completely built in the wilderness around the train station.

In this process, there has been a very large investment in local infrastructure, which has brought huge demands for various infrastructure and promoted economic development.

Think about it, how much steel, cement, bricks, timber and supporting materials are needed to build a new city? At the same time, how many construction jobs can be directly provided by large-scale infrastructure construction!

These are eventually transformed into demand for industrial products, which in turn drives the development of overall employment. With more jobs, people have jobs and more income, and consumption will naturally follow.

Future generations will not understand why some countries are so fond of large-scale infrastructure construction, and many of them are useless facilities... Is it because there is too much money and no place to spend it?

In fact, for this kind of large-scale infrastructure construction, it does not matter whether the facilities are useful or not. What is important is to stimulate economic development.

There are too many truths to explain, but simply put: think with your toes, if you build a new city, how much demand for industrial products will be created, how many jobs will be created, and how many families’ jobs will be saved!

In modern times, countries would even dig and fill a drainage ditch, fill it and dig it again... Why? No reason, just find a reason to create jobs and pay wages to the unemployed!

Well, that's right, I'm talking about the United States. They did this during the Great Depression in the 1930s...

So many times something that seems particularly absurd has a self-consistent logic, although this logic seems very absurd to many people.

As for why you don’t build more new drainage ditches and don’t dig old drainage ditches repeatedly, well, in fact, in most cases, one drainage ditch is enough, and more are useless!

Besides, building new drainage ditches is too troublesome and involves too many things. It is easier and easier to dig up the old ones.

As for whether the drains are useful...that's not important. What's important is to find an excuse to pay wages to the unemployed.

Of course, what I said above is a bit extreme and even more ridiculous, but if you look at the essence through the phenomenon, the principles are actually the same.

Investing in infrastructure facilitates people's transportation and improves living standards. At the same time, artificial demand is created to stimulate economic development.

Of course, if this kind of thing is done too much, it is easy to cause many economic problems.

This chapter is not over yet, please click on the next page to continue reading!

Today's Dachu Empire is actually in this state... Why is it that the empire already has thousands of tons of gold reserves, but it is still so keen on gold? For this reason, it does not hesitate to fight in South Africa and build railways to dig for gold.

Mine.

Isn’t it just to obtain more gold to issue more banknotes and increase the total amount of currency in circulation!

However, putting aside many detailed negative consequences, the economic development driven by the current large-scale construction of the Chu Empire is extremely rapid, and it also allows the people's living standards to improve at a speed visible to the naked eye.
To be continued...