Rise of the 1630s South America

Chapter 778 The Bank of the Black River ([-])

"Woo..." The shrill train whistle sounded, and a train loaded with goods slowly stopped at Hejinbao Station.Following the station master's order, a group of station workers who had been waiting for a long time rushed up immediately and began the intense work of unloading materials.The truck was loaded with various things, including coking coal needed by Tieling Special Steel Plant, salted fish and cured meat from coastal areas, and a large number of mechanical equipment and parts.

After these things are unloaded at the station, the workers will immediately transfer them to the wharf on the other side of the Heihe River by ferry, and then load another train there, and finally transport them to Chengshanbao and Tielingbao, two urgently needed factories. A place for all kinds of materials.It can be seen from this that without the extension of the railway, it is unimaginable to build an industrial city in the inland area. The huge amount of various materials alone is enough to squeeze out the transportation potential of a small country like the east coast.

However, with the railway as a transportation tool, the vast and fertile inland area is equivalent to opening the door to people on the east coast.Didn’t you see that most of the colonists in Western countries are stagnant in the coastal areas of their respective colonies, and let the inland areas sleep there?The reason is not that they don't want to develop, but that they are powerless to inland areas with limited manpower.It is completely different with trains. For example, the East Bank has developed to the third generation, with a total cargo capacity of more than 96 tons (12 tons per car, 8 freight cars), and an average speed of more than 35 kilometers per hour. The train can pull a large number of people and materials from the coastal area to the inland hinterland hundreds of kilometers away in one breath, which can be called a miraculous existence.

It is now September of 1649. Chengshan Fort has been built on the Northwest Railway, and it is currently advancing to Tieling Fort, the terminal of the railway. Coal mines, gold mines, iron mines, and special steel and machining bases are connected to the core areas of the east coast, and have since then continuously made their own contributions to the development of the east coast republic.

However, given that the population of the seven towns along the railway line is not very abundant and their economic strength is average, the National Railway Administration has no intention of double-tracking the railway.Compared with the 180-kilometer Luomei Line (the railway has been double-tracked), it is difficult for the Northwest Railway to achieve a balance of income and expenditure within a short period of time.Unless the country continues to carry out key immigration here for many years-in fact, the Immigration Department is preparing to do so-and revitalize the economy here, there is only a glimmer of hope for profit.But even so, it will take several years. During this period, the Northwest Railway can only rely on state subsidies to survive until the population and economy of the towns along the line reach a critical point.

However, there is still a hidden worry about this railway line that has not been resolved, and that is the Heihe river with a span of more than 40 meters to the west of Hejinbao.As we all know, railway bridges and ordinary highway bridges are completely of two levels, and the impact force and shear force it has to bear are many times stronger than wooden bridges and stone bridges under low speed and low load conditions. If it is closed, it will be a collapsed end.

When the railway was repaired to Hejinbao last time, the State Railway Administration had actually considered building a railway bridge on the Heihe River.Because if there is no railway bridge, all materials transported in the direction of Chengshan and Tieling have to be loaded and unloaded at the Hejinbao Wharf, which not only increases a lot of workload, but more importantly, greatly reduces the transportation efficiency. unbearable.

After the State Railway Administration announced that it would temporarily abandon the construction of the railway bridge, Ma Jia, chairman of the Northwest Reclamation Bureau, was immediately dissatisfied.For this reason, he specially brought a group of people to the ferry on both sides of Hejinbao to inspect and collect materials, and then went directly to the Executive Committee and the State Railway Administration, asking them to deploy professional and technical personnel and increase special funds to strive for the shortest possible time. The railway bridge will be repaired within a short period of time to ensure the transportation efficiency of the Northwest Railway.

What kind of qualifications is the vest, and soon, under his "nonsense", the members of the executive committee finally agreed to build the Heihe Bridge-a railway bridge capable of carrying 100 tons of trains.To be honest, the difficulty of this railway bridge is not the pier, but the material of the bridge deck. More precisely, the bridge deck bearing the load must be made of very tough materials.As for the bridge piers, there are not so strict requirements. To put it bluntly, even wooden bridge piers can last for a long time. The technical difficulty is mainly in the bridge deck material.

After a demonstration, the technicians of the State Railway Administration decided to customize various types of wrought iron parts in the comprehensive workshop of Dayuhe Armory, and then connect them with fasteners such as screws and buckles.As for why you don't use steel, I'm sorry, the technology tree for rolling steel in the east bank has not yet been lit, so it cannot be used.As for cast steel, part of the rails on the east coast in the early days were indeed cast steel, but because the castability of steel was not good and the quality was not stable enough, mass-produced things such as rails have already been fully converted to cast iron.

The wrought iron parts are all forged by steam hammer, and the cost is quite high due to the special models and sizes of various parts and the small number of production.I believe that if it weren't for the great face of the vest, it would be difficult to build this railway bridge.According to preliminary calculations by the Finance Department of the State Administration of Railways, the total cost of this railway bridge is likely to be tens of thousands of yuan. If the construction process does not go smoothly, it is not impossible for the total cost to exceed 10 yuan.

Tens of thousands of vain money were used to build a bridge. If the people in the Ministry of the Army knew about it, it would be a mess!They have now been forced to abolish several infantry artillery companies, and their financial situation is relatively difficult. They did not expect that the white shirts are so extravagant. A bridge will cost tens of thousands of dollars. It is estimated that there will be troubles in the future.

In any case, the construction of the Heihe Bridge is still crucial to improving the transportation efficiency of the Northwest Railway.At present, the bridge has entered the stage of full-scale construction. The construction team of the State Railway Administration cleaned up some shallows in the center of the Heihe River, and then specially used them as places for placing bridge piers.Viviani, a senior researcher who is engaged in mathematics research at the Academy of Natural Sciences, suggested that the construction team place a bridge pier every 6-8 meters (the railway bridge built by Japan in Korea at the end of the 19th century had a bridge pier every 6 meters) after field surveys, to try to Share the force to ensure the safety of the bridge body.

However, after there are more bridge piers, it also brings some troubles to the flood discharge of Heihe River, and this has already erupted when the autumn rains continued this autumn.Due to the construction of settlements, railways, highways, stations and wharves, the forests in the upper and lower reaches of the Hejinbao section of the Heihe River have been cut down in large numbers, and some wetlands that originally served as flood discharge reservoirs have also been artificially filled. Negative impact of the negative impact, there was a flood near Hejinbao in May.The flood destroyed a village near the river bank, and swept away more than a dozen villagers and dozens of livestock. In addition, some sleepers stored on the pier were also taken far downstream, if you count the submerged farmland , this loss is quite small.

Although this flood outbreak was affected by extremely heavy precipitation factors - the precipitation in the area during the same period was more than 200 millimeters more than last year, but increasingly frequent human activities have also exacerbated the risk of flood outbreaks.For example, residents of Hejinbao like to grow soybeans, which can easily lead to wetland siltation; another example is to widen the waterway of the Heihe River, and the natural regulation and storage function of the wetland itself is completely lost, which leads to changes in the flooded area, which intensifies flood disasters.All in all, this flood has sounded a wake-up call to people on the east coast who have been developing aggressively over the years, requiring them to pay more attention to environmental factors when carrying out development and construction activities, so as not to cause huge disasters in their future lives.

In order to solve this problem—especially after the construction of the Heihe Bridge began, this problem became more prominent—the Northwest Reclamation Bureau and the Hejinbao government formulated a huge artificial reservoir plan.They decided to transform some wetlands on both sides of the Heihe River into artificial reservoirs, and adjust the water storage capacity through artificial reservoirs. As for the swamps and wetlands that were drained in the process, they can be confidently filled up and used as arable land.These are very fertile shallow silts, good fertilizer materials, and if they are used to plant grains or soybeans, the harvest should be good.

In addition, the Heihe river bed also needs to be cleaned regularly.Because every time the rainfall increases, the river water will become very turbid, and the amount of sediment carried upstream will also increase greatly. After a long time, firstly, it will affect the shipping and secondly, it will affect the water storage capacity.The people on the east bank are basically familiar with these things. During the dry season in winter (which happens to be the slack season), the towns and towns will organize the people in the area to dig rivers. It has almost become a fixed project in rural areas everywhere.This kind of large-scale mass infrastructure project is generally regarded as a kind of corvee, because the local government will not pay wages to anyone, and in some places even the villagers are required to bring their own meals.But generally speaking, everyone has little resistance to this kind of project, because aren't the facilities built for everyone's own use?

In any case, the changes brought by the railway bridge and even the Northwest Railway to the Heihe River Basin are obvious.Local residents no longer need to spend days and nights traveling to big cities along the eastern coast to buy a few beautiful clothes, and they no longer need to worry about the grain they harvest will be thrown into their hands due to traffic bottlenecks. , The railway brought them everything including daily necessities, luxury goods, production tools and even department stores.They only need to live quietly in the quiet inland countryside, and then enjoy the dividends brought to them by the country's industrial and technological progress.

(End of this chapter)