I want to be emperor

The Susong Railway, this railway is the opening highlight prepared by the Imperial Railway Company. They want to completely open up the national railway construction situation through the construction and operation of this railway.

Through the actual construction and operation, the necessity of railway construction and the huge benefits it brings will be proved to the people of the country and the high level of the empire.

After all, the investment in the railway is too large. The construction cost per kilometer ranges from [-] to [-] to [-] Chu Yuan. If it extends to hundreds or even thousands of kilometers, it will cost millions or even tens of millions of Chu Yuan. invest.

This is just the investment of a railway line, and according to the preliminary construction of the national railway network, it will add up to at least several thousand kilometers.

The initial national railway network, two main line railways, plus some auxiliary line railways, may cost hundreds of millions of dollars in investment.

With so much money thrown down, can it make a profit?
Most importantly, how much local economic development can be driven?How much can it contribute to the overall economic development of the empire?

These are all unknowns, even various experts and scholars have demonstrated through various data that the construction of railways is promising.

But after all, it is all on paper. Whether it can be done or not, and how good the effect is is still unknown.

So many people are more worried.

Even the railway company is very cautious about this. This mess has caused a huge negative impact, even for them, it is the end of resignation.

Therefore, after many comparisons, they carefully chose the Su-Song Railway as the first long-distance railway.

Because the industrial and commercial economy of this place is already very good, the demand for both passenger transport and freight transport is very large. Although inland river transport could be used in the past, the river transport is still overwhelmed, not convenient, and the cost is not cheap.

If the railway is opened in this place, the expected operating profit will be very high, and the railway investment cost can be recovered quickly, and then the feasibility and necessity of railway construction can be proved to the people of the country and the high-level empire.

Under such circumstances, the Dachu Mansion newspaper soon announced the construction plan of the Su-Song Railway.

After the construction plan was announced, many people were quite excited, looking forward to getting on the convenient train as soon as possible.

However, when the people of the country are building railways, some people in the country do not have trains and railways. Instead, they are competitors of trains: steam ships!
Of course, steamships are not ordinary people, not even the shipping industry itself, but shipyards.

The second largest shipyard in the Great Chu Empire, Guangzhou Shipyard came to seek cooperation immediately after the next-door neighbor Guangzhou Machinery Company developed a high-pressure steam engine to order a ship-use steam engine.

However, the marine steam engine they ordered at the beginning was not for ordinary transportation, but to build an experimental steam warship for the navy.

The Navy is earlier with high-pressure steam engines. They have been thinking about putting steam engines on warships for several years, and they have invested money in research on the Steam Engine Research Institute of the Royal Institute of Technology.

But they did not expect that the regular army steam engine research institute failed to produce a high-pressure steam engine, but the Guangzhou Machinery Company of the informal army first developed it. …

But it doesn't matter, the navy doesn't care who developed the steam engine, as long as they can push the steam engine of the battleship.

Therefore, after hearing that Guangzhou Machinery Company had developed a high-pressure steam engine, it began to design a steam engine ship for testing, and at the same time entrusted Guangzhou Shipyard to build it.

In this way, Guangzhou Shipyard took the lead in contacting Guangzhou Machinery Company.

In the process of contact, after they knew some details about the current high-pressure steam engine, they had other thoughts.

This steam engine can be used in the field of warships, and it can also be used in the field of ordinary merchant ships, especially in the field of inland river and offshore transportation.

When sailing in the ocean, because the stability of the steam engine is not good, and the endurance is a bit short, and the power output is also relatively short. In fact, it is not appropriate for an ocean-going ship to rely solely on the steam engine. Play a strike, and then you can only be a dead fish in the vast sea...

Therefore, the first steam warship designed by the navy still has sails, and the steam engine is not used for daily sailing, but for special occasions such as entering and leaving the port, maneuvering during battle, and accelerating when chasing the enemy.

People's navy has never expected that today's steam engines can propel thousands of tons of warships for routine navigation.

This is the case for naval warships, and it is inevitable for ocean-going merchant ships.

At present, if a steam engine is installed on an ocean-going vessel, it will still play an auxiliary role. This auxiliary role will be particularly useful for warships, especially when adjusting the course during battle, and when seizing the T prefix. Has a great tactical advantage.

But for ordinary ocean-going merchant ships, this auxiliary function is limited.

However, what Guangzhou Shipyard thought of was not ocean-going merchant ships, but inland river and offshore vessels.

What they envisage is that if steam power is used on inland watercraft, then inland watercraft can be freed from sails and trackers, making it simple and convenient to go upstream.

This will be huge for inland waterway transport.

When transporting inland rivers, the biggest trouble for current sailing ships is how to go upstream. When using sails, the limitations are very large, and sometimes they are forced to use trackers.

But if it is replaced by a steam engine, then all these troubles will not be a problem.

Steam-powered ships can sail freely on all navigable rivers.

Based on this, they can already see how big the potential market for this kind of steam riverboat is.

For this reason, when the whole country was immersed in the train, they had already signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Guangzhou Machinery Company to obtain the supply of steam engines for civilian ships.

This time, they walked ahead of their big brother Songjiang Naval Shipyard, and also ahead of Luohua Shipyard, which has always been known for its active innovation.

Their Guangzhou Shipyard is at the forefront of all competitors this time.

Guangzhou Machinery Company also attaches great importance to the strategic cooperation with Guangzhou Shipyard, and they also want to open up the market for high-pressure steam engines for ships. …

And although I got orders for several navy steam engines before, the unit price was not low, but how should I put it... The total order volume is too small.

Adding up all the orders, the total horsepower is less than 1000 horsepower... This is not as many as the order of the Songjiang Railway Company. The Jiangnan Railway Company ordered ten locomotives in one go in order to operate the Songjiang Railway that will be completed soon. The total horsepower is more than [-] horses.

At the same time, major mining companies are also actively contacting them, and have placed orders or are preparing to order trains. These orders are fragmented, but they add up to a large number.

After all, at present, there are actually thousands of kilometers of railway lines in the Great Chu Empire. Most of these railways belong to mining area railways, and these mining area railways need a lot of trains.

In terms of industrial steam engines, the progress is not very great... The main reason is that today's high-pressure steam engines are still relatively expensive, and their stability is not as good as that of the mature and stable low-pressure steam engines. Even if they have advantages in power and energy consumption, they are not enough Let major enterprises abandon the low-pressure steam engine and completely turn to the embrace of the high-pressure steam engine.

More importantly, many domestic companies that are willing to use steam engines already have low-pressure steam engines. They have invested heavily in the purchase of low-pressure steam engines before.

Therefore, the market development of industrial high-pressure steam engines still needs to continue to work hard, at least to improve the stability of the current high-pressure steam engines, and to reduce production costs and selling prices.

However, if ordinary industries are still more cautious about high-pressure steam engines, the largest light industry in China, that is, the textile industry, is very interested in high-pressure steam engines.

In the past few years, the textile industry has always wanted to use steam engines, but the cost of low-pressure steam engines is high, the operating costs are also high, and the credit is still small... This is a loss-making business for the textile industry with relatively low gross profit margins.

The high-pressure steam engine is different. Even if it is still relatively expensive, it may lose money to use it, but if it is further developed, it will be more cost-effective to use.

The most important thing is to be able to quickly increase production capacity.

Nowadays, the textile industry is still booming, and there is a huge demand for various textiles in the domestic market and even overseas markets. For all textile enterprises, they are afraid that they will not be able to produce or sell them.

Therefore, Su Qin Textile Company, the leading textile company, also found Guangzhou Machinery Company to discuss a strategic cooperation in order to use the steam engine as soon as possible.

However, this kind of cooperation needs to continue to be developed and improved in the future. The existing high-pressure steam engine is too expensive, and Su Qin Textile Company is not a fool, and will not do business at a loss.

Trains are selling well, and industrial steam engines have a clear route and promising prospects.

But in the shipping industry, Guangzhou Machinery Company has not made much progress. Among the expected ocean-going ships, except for the Navy, no ordinary ocean-going merchant ship is willing to purchase high-pressure steam engines...

Even if it is the navy, they only plan to build a few test ships, but they don't plan to launch a large-scale steam warship right away. …

Under such circumstances, Guangzhou Machinery Company can only focus on inland river vessels.

In this way, they also hit it off with the Guangzhou Shipyard.

Soon, Guangzhou Machinery Company set up a research and development team for marine steam engines, and with the cooperation of technicians sent by Guangzhou Shipyard, began to design and build steam engines for inland water ships.

In order to reduce the technical difficulty, it is also for the production cost to avoid the excessively high selling price leading to poor market acceptance.

They adopted a small-cylinder high-pressure steam engine with lower technical difficulty, and reduced the technical difficulty and manufacturing cost by reducing the diameter of the cylinder.

After all, in the current steam engine production, the most costly part is the processing of the cylinder.

In the processing of the cylinder, the larger the cylinder caliber and the larger the volume, the more difficult it will be, and the lower the yield rate will be.

This thing is actually similar to the production and processing of artillery, the larger the caliber, the higher the cost.

As for the small-caliber cylinder, the manufacturing cost of the core component of the cylinder can be controlled, and then the total power can be increased by connecting two cylinders or even three or four cylinders in series.

In this way, they soon designed the first high-pressure steam engine for civilian ships.

This is a steam engine with a power of only 52 horsepower, but it is smaller in size and lighter in weight, and it is propelled by a double-cylinder linkage.

Because most of the key technologies are actually directly applied from the Type 21 steam engine, the design is simple and the construction is also simpler, and the prototype was built quickly.

Then, the engineers of Guangzhou Shipyard directly carried it onto a prepared test ship 'Zheng He' for testing.

After the installation was completed, the first practical ship powered by pure steam engine was born in the history of the Great Chu Empire and also in the history of mankind.

The Zheng He, 46 meters in length and [-] meters in width, is a typical shallow water inland vessel. It originally used Chinese-style hard sails, but now the sails have been removed, and some internal modifications have been made to install steam engines. And deploy coal bunkers, etc.

On both sides of the ship, there are two huge paddle wheels.

In fact, the Guangzhou Shipyard planned to use propeller technology at the beginning, but the current propeller technology is not yet mature. Even the navy's test ship only has one propeller, and the others still use paddle wheels with stern propulsion. , with push on both sides.

The navy is going to verify various technical solutions in order to find a better way to promote it.

In order to reduce technical risks, the Guangzhou Shipyard adopted a paddle wheel layout on both sides of the Zheng He.

Because all the mature technical solutions are adopted, although the overall performance is average, it is also easy to modify and build.

In less than three months, the Zheng He has been refitted and is ready for sea trials.

Well, this time was in mid-April of the 22nd year of Chengshun, only two months had passed since the public test of the Type 21 train, and the plan for the Su-Song Railway had only just been announced.

This is not to say that the Guangzhou Shipyard moved quickly, and it only took a few months to get it out. In fact, the modification of the Zheng He lasted for three months, and several months of planning were carried out three months ago. Design, steam engine design and production. …

It has actually been half a year since Guangzhou Machinery Company and Guangzhou Shipyard jointly built this steam engine ship.

Because after the high-pressure steam engine developed by Guangzhou Machinery Company was developed, the locomotive used as the application, that is, the Type 21 locomotive, industrial steam engine, and naval steam engine, actually belonged to three different project teams for parallel research and development.

When the news spread that the Zheng He steamship was going to conduct public sailing trials, many local people in Guangzhou also went to the Pearl River to watch the excitement.

The whole scene was the same as the train test in Jinling City two months ago, very lively.

Of course, the actual influence is still a bit weaker. After all, during the Jinling City train test, the emperor personally participated in the test by car.

As for the Zheng He's sailing test, only local officials participated, and more technicians from Guangzhou Shipbuilding and Guangzhou Machinery Company.

In addition, a group of managements of major shipping companies were invited to watch the experiment.

Among them is Liu Jiaquan, the boss of Liuhe Shipping Company, the former big boss.

And Liu Jiaquan is very interested in the Zheng He in front of him, and even more interested in the inland river steamer. He has even planned that if the Zheng He sails smoothly, he can also buy the ship by himself, and then use it on the Pearl River. on a regular route for operating steamships.

He is very optimistic about the progress of river steamers!
The Liu family started out as pirates, and when the empire was united, they chose to wash their hands and go ashore. With hundreds of pirates under their command, they transformed themselves into a Liuhe trading company, and it grew bigger and bigger.

At its peak, the Liuhe Trading Company owned more than 20 ships, all of which were large ocean-going ships, with large ones weighing [-] tons and small ones weighing [-] to [-] tons.

At their peak, they even had a colony on the east coast of India... Their overall size was able to enter the top five ranks among the domestic armed trading companies.

However, as the empire unified and merged the major armed trading companies, even if Liu Jiaquan didn't want to, he could only choose to merge with Nanyang Trading Company and become part of the newly established Western Trading Company.

Because of the particularity of the newly established Western Trading Company, the government has strictly controlled the company, and Liu Jiaquan has no actual management rights except for the shares.

However, he was not discouraged. Since armed trade cannot be carried out, then he will engage in ordinary trade and shipping.

Therefore, they successively sold some of the shares of Western Trading Company to cash out, and then took the money to establish the new Liuhe Trading Company and Liuhe Shipping Company.

The Liuhe Trading Company is not doing very well... After all, there are too many people engaged in ordinary trading, and the competition is very fierce. The most important thing is that the Liu family has spent their entire lives in the sea, and they have not done ordinary trading in a serious way!
He really doesn't know how to do overseas trade without bringing hundreds of armed personnel and driving a few armed merchant ships full of naval guns!

So the new Willow River Trading Company isn't doing very well...

However, the Liuhe Shipping Company is booming. After all, Liu Jiaquan and several of his main subordinates have been running ships for at least [-] years, and running ships is commonplace for them. …

They first ran the shipping business in the Southeast Asia region, and then gradually expanded to the domestic coast.

Finally, relying on the base camp of Guangzhou, it will deeply operate regular routes in the Pearl River Basin, and this year it will enter the Yangtze River Basin.

In this way, the three major shipping businesses of inland river, offshore and ocean are in full bloom, and they are all doing very well. I dare not say that they are on the same level as those large government-run shipping companies directly under the Ministry of Industry, but among the large number of domestic shipping companies, they are also It can be regarded as the top [-] shipping companies in China.

Because the shipping company is developing well, the overseas trade business is half-dead, and in addition to getting older, Liu Jiaquan now also focuses his career on the shipping company.

In the past few years, he has successively sold his shares in Xiyang Trading Company. Anyway, this company has nothing to do with him, and although Lilan seems to be huge, the potential expenditure is larger, and the future dividends will not be much. It is better to directly Selling it to the Ministry of Industry... and the Ministry of Industry offered a very good price for the recovered shares in order to fully control the Western Trading Company and the Eastern Trading Company.

After selling the shares, he invested part of the funds in the shipping company, and the other part in other industries to diversify investment and dilute risks.

Liu Jiaquan, who has completed the asset integration, has a considerable asset scale. He holds the wholly-owned Liuhe Shipping Company and the half-dead Liuhe Trading Company. In addition, he is also the second largest shareholder of Luohua Shipyard.

His actual worth is actually more than that of the Li family, the richest man in Guangdong on the surface!It's just that his reputation is not obvious, and he is very low-key on weekdays. The most important thing is that he rarely contacts ordinary people directly in the industry he is engaged in, so the outside world is not very familiar with him.

However, for the industry insiders of Guangzhou Shipyard and Guangzhou Machinery Company, Liu Jiaquan's reputation is very big.

The former Liuhe Trading Company was very strong, and it had been a partner of these two companies for many years. He had been ordering ships from the Guangzhou Shipyard for many years, and in the early years he also helped Guangzhou Machinery Company export various iron products overseas.

Now that he has transformed into shipping, he is still a rare top rich man in the country.

According to the preliminary contact between the two parties, this Liu Jiaquan is very interested in steam ships, not only in inland river steam ships, but also in coastal steam ships.

So these two big companies want to open Liu Jiaquan's money bag and take money from it.

In the anticipation of a group of people, on April 22, 23 Chengshun, Zheng He's first public trial voyage began.

As the chimney on the Zheng He spewed thin white smoke and made a loud whistle, the Zheng He slowly reversed from the pier, then adjusted its direction, and began to go upstream.

I chose to go upstream for the first trial voyage, in order to prove to everyone, especially the potential customers present, the great advantages of steam ships sailing upstream.

Sure enough, when the more than 40-meter-long Zheng He began to slowly go upstream, it immediately attracted the attention of Liu Jiaquan and others.

"This boat is interesting. Now it can run so fast against the current, and it doesn't need to constantly adjust the angle of the sail like a sailing boat. It seems that the crew is not much needed!"

The Liu family is an old captain, and he can basically get a general idea just by looking at it, and what he infers is basically the sailing speed and even the operating cost.

"This steamship has a head!" Liu Jiaquan only watched the trial voyage for only ten minutes. Strictly speaking, the Zheng He has not gone far, and he has already decided in his heart which steamship to order, and then seize the inland river. shipping market.

He has even started to plan what routes to run in the early stage, and how long is the interval between the ships between the fixed routes. The route on the Pearl River is definitely going to be done, but the route on the Yangtze River is obviously more promising, and Li Lan is also higher. .

Even if the Jiangnan Railway has already started construction, how can the transportation capacity of the train be comparable to that of a large-tonnage ship.

In terms of transportation costs, inland waterway shipping is definitely much lower than railway transportation.

What's more, many places do not have railways in the short term or even in the long term, and the main mode of transportation in these places is still inland water transport.

Therefore, Liu Jiaquan believes that even with the huge impact of trains, inland waterway shipping has great potential!