When Xu Haoyang, Qi Geer and several key skilled workers came out of the production workshop, the students who were waiting on the side gave them flowers and waved the banner of "successful furnace".

In the warm applause of everyone, Xu Haoyang and Zieger returned to the rostrum and officially announced the success of the No. 1 blast furnace. Xia Bohai, Qin Zheng and others shook hands with them one by one, congratulated them, Xia Bohai also delivered a speech on behalf of the East China government, highly praised all the staff of Qingdao Iron and Steel Plant and German experts, so that the East China government can finally produce its own steel, no longer rely on imports, and also encourage them to make persistent efforts, continue to work hard, make more and better steel, and make greater contributions to the East China government's five-year plan and industrial construction.

Then Xia Bohai and others visited the blast furnace production workshop, and visited the workers of the first line of production, and listened to Xu Haoyang, Ziger introduced the production of the iron plant, the first furnace of molten iron about 30 tons, of which 20 tons will be made together with a part of the scrap steel in the open-hearth steelmaking, on this also to test the steel-making effect of the open-hearth, and the other 10 tons are cast into iron ingots, on the one hand, the composition is analyzed, on the other hand, some iron products are tried to be cast, in order to test the quality of refining.

At this time, most of the molten iron has flowed into the open-hearth workshop, and some of it is injected into the molds of the iron ingots in the foundry workshop, waiting to be cooled and condensed into iron ingots. Of course, at this time, it is still hot metal.

After the molten iron in the blast furnace is discharged, the work is not over, because after the blast furnace ironmaking, two by-products can also be obtained, one is the blast furnace gas, which contains about 30% carbon monoxide, which can be used for self-use gas in the metallurgical industry, or supplied to civilian use, which can reduce energy consumption and improve the utilization rate of resources, so it has great recovery value, but at the end of ironmaking, the blast furnace gas contains a large amount of dust, which must be purified before it can be transported. However, in this era, there is no better purification method, and it can only rely on the natural settlement of dust, and it takes a while to extract the blast furnace gas from the blast furnace and transfer it to the storage equipment.

Another by-product is waste slag, which is an excellent material for making high-quality cement and concrete, and of course cannot be abandoned, so it takes 4 to 5 days after the blast furnace is made to clean up and recover the by-products before they can be put into production again.

After the celebration, everyone had lunch in the canteen of the iron and steel plant, Xia Bohai, Qin Zheng and others went back to the administrative area to work, and in the afternoon, Zhan Tianyou was accompanied by Lu Hong of the Industrial and Mining Energy Committee and visited the Sifang factory.

The original Sifang factory is a railway factory in Germany for the establishment of supporting services for the Jiaoji Railway, and it is also the contractor of the Jiaoji Railway, responsible for manufacturing, repairing locomotives, building railway projects and supporting facilities, as well as the research and development test work of railways, locomotives, train steam engines, etc., at this time, the preliminary completion of the Sifang factory, covering an area of about 25 acres, has now built an office building, production workshop warehouse, power room, locomotive garage, water tower, assembly bed boiler, forging plant and other facilities, and directly connected with the Sifang station. There are more than 60 sets of various machinery and equipment, 26 German experts and 327 Chinese employees.

Since this is a factory closely related to railway construction, Zhan Tianyou is also very interested. The visit was very serious, and now the Sifang factory is mainly divided into four production departments, which are locomotive assembly and maintenance department, steam engine department, track parts department, and railway engineering department. Among them, the locomotive assembly and maintenance department is the largest, and all the trains are assembled here.

According to the agreement reached between the traverser and Germany, Germany will provide all the components of the 6 locomotives to the traverser and complete the assembly in Qingdao, which is a low cost for the redemption of prisoners, and the traverser also purchased 12 steam engines and boilers for the train, preparing to build other parts of the locomotive by itself, and German engineers provide guidance, after all, the locomotive is built with steam engines and boilers, and other parts are not very difficult.

Lu Hong introduced that the locomotives, steam engines, boilers, etc. provided by Germany to the traverser are the most popular products in Germany at present, and the technology is mature and practical. The total weight of the locomotive is about 1.5 tons, the total power is 1000 watts, and the theory can pull a locomotive of about 120 tons at a speed of 40-50 kilometers per hour, but the locomotive generally pulled does not exceed 100 tons, and the speed does not exceed 30 kilometers per hour, while the actual cargo volume is about 50-60 tons. But for now, it's totally sufficient.

At this time, the Sifang factory has assembled 4 steam locomotives, 32 passenger cars and 40 freight cars, all of which have been used for the railway operation of the Jiaoji Railway. At this time, two locomotives were being assembled in the factory, and one locomotive was undergoing daily maintenance in the factory.

The current work of the steam engine department is mainly to disassemble the steam engine and boiler provided by Germany, understand the composition and operation principle of the steam engine, and carry out surveying and mapping, and prepare for the next step of imitation.

And here, Zhan Tianyou also looked at the students who came with him, as well as more than 100 younger students, surrounding a half-disassembled steam car, listening carefully to the explanation of a German engineer, almost all of them holding a small notebook to record. Lu Hong told Zhan Tianyou that these are all students of the Hope School run by the East China Government, who have been studying for a year and are here to take practical classes today. Zhan Tianyou was also quite shocked, although the Qing court also opened some new schools, but there are very few such teaching, it seems that overseas Chinese have begun to cultivate the next generation of talents.

The track accessories department is to produce the accessories required for railway construction, mainly rails and sleepers, train chairs and other equipment outsourced to other factories, and not produced in the Sifang factory, and now the rails required by the East China government are purchased from the Hanyang Iron Works, which also makes the Hanyang Iron Works a lot of money.

In the old time and space, for a long time, the rails produced by the Hanyang Iron Works were usually considered to be of low quality, and Ye Jingkui, a famous industrialist of the Republic of China, said in the "History of the Production of Han Yeping" that "the railway Westerners everywhere tested, and the rails of the Hanchang factory were unusable." In addition, when the Shanghai-Nanjing Railway was being built, the [test report] of the rails produced by the Hanyang Iron Works issued by the United Kingdom believed that the carbon content of the rails produced by the Hanyang Iron Works was too small, which was difficult to last, and the phosphorus content was too much, resulting in the risk of breakage. Therefore, the rail samples sent by the Hanyang Iron Works were unqualified. Both cases were also widely cited in later history books as proof that the rails produced by the Hanyang Iron Works were not of high quality.

Some people also believe that this is due to the excessive phosphorus content of the iron ore from the Daye Mine, which was used for steelmaking at the Hanyang Iron Works Works, but since 1899, Japan has been signing a contract with China for the purchase of Daye Iron Ore and purchasing iron ore in large quantities. And send special personnel to carry out strict testing, each batch of ore to extract three copies, China and Japan joint testing, and even controversial to ask a third party for testing, but this also shows that Daye Iron Mine can still produce high-quality iron ore.

Moreover, the smelting process of this era, the dephosphorization technology is not a high-tech technology, whether it is an open hearth or a converter, there is a more mature and reliable phosphorus removal technology, so the iron ore phosphorus content is not high in the quality of the rail, and it may not be correct.

Zheng Guanying mentioned in the "Sixty Articles of the Preparation of the Iron Factory": "If you want to purchase from the Hubei Factory, the subordinates who handle it must be picky and find faults, and use words to buy them for personal gain." It shows that in order to control the rights of China to build railways, foreign countries have manipulated the quality inspection, so that the rails of the Hanyang Iron Works have been squeezed out. It follows from this that the test results do not prove the true quality of Hanyang rails.

Moreover, in the era of the traverser, the rails produced by the Hanyang Iron Works were found in Luoyang, Shaanxi, Hengyang, Hunan, Shijiazhuang, Hebei, and Dazhou, Sichuan, and were still available after more than 100 years, which also shows that the quality of the rails produced by the Hanyang Iron Works is not bad, at least some of the rails are of good quality. Therefore, the traverser dared to buy the rails from the Hanyang Iron Works, and of course, the purchased rails were strictly tested, and two sets of testing equipment were purchased from Germany.

In addition to the rails, another important part of the construction of the railway is the sleeper, because the sleeper not only fixes the position of the rail, but also transmits the huge pressure transmitted by the rail to the track bed. Therefore, it must be strong enough, but also have a certain flexibility and elasticity. In this era, the sleepers were generally made of wood, but there were also a small number of reinforced concrete.

The advantages of wooden sleepers are good elasticity, easy processing and easy use, so since the existence of railways, wooden sleepers have been the main type of sleepers. However, the disadvantage of wooden sleepers is also very damp, not only to use a large number of high-quality wood, but also to have a short service life, even after anti-corrosion treatment of wooden sleepers, the service life is not more than 15 years.

The advantages of reinforced concrete sleepers are extremely obvious: long service life, high stability, low maintenance effort, and much lower damage and scrap rates than wooden sleepers. And the disadvantage is that the self-weight is large, so the settlement rate is high, the roadbed needs to be hardened by process, the early construction period is long, the input cost is large, and a large amount of steel needs to be consumed.

On the whole, reinforced concrete sleepers are of course the development trend of railway construction, because it is after World War II, it has accounted for more than 9 percent of the use of sleepers, but in this era, because the output of cement and steel is not high, so all countries in the world are still dominated by wooden sleepers.

The choice of the traverser is to use reinforced concrete sleepers in railway stations and wooden sleepers on general roads. Because the vehicle scheduling in the railway station is frequent, the density of vehicles coming and going is large, and the loading and royal goods are also completed in the station, and because the railway distance in the railway station is shorter, there are a large number of buildings, the foundation should also be hardened, so it is more suitable to use reinforced concrete sleeper;

At this time, in the warehouse of the track accessories department, a large number of rails, wooden sleepers, reinforced concrete sleepers are stored, and in the production workshop, various sleepers and other spare parts are also being produced.

There are only a few people in the railway engineering department, because the work of this department is basically outside the construction, and the logistics personnel who stay in the factory are all logistics personnel, and Lu Hong also told Zhan Tianyou that a special car will be arranged tomorrow to send Zhan Tianyou to visit the construction site of the Jiaoji Railway.