For Peter, who had been on the train for ten days, he did not feel the long journey, but not only that, but the whole mission, after ten days of journey, was conquered by the train.

No one can ignore the changes that trains have brought to land transportation.

Even after getting off the train at the Zhongdu Railway Station, unlike others who were surprised by the magnificence of the Zhongdu Railway Station, Peter deliberately ran to the end of the platform to look at the locomotive that was still spewing smoke.

"He's all made of iron?"

Explaining that he was not fluent in Chinese, Peter asked the train driver.

The train driver in the railway uniform has obviously long been accustomed to people like him, after all, everyone has curiosity.

"Yes, it's all iron, made of tens of thousands of catties of iron, you see, such a big iron guy, as long as he burns coal, he can run much faster than a horse. Let me tell you, in the early years, there were still people who didn't do their best and rode horses and raced trains, and guess what the result was? ”

Even as a tsar, Peter was full of curiosity about these things, and he immediately asked.

"Well, what was going on?"

Even though he knew the result, Peter still asked curiously.

"Do you know the stagecoach? It was the passenger carriage running on the official road, and they saw that the business was robbed by the train, so they tried to prove that the carriage was better than the train, so they challenged the train and let the horse and the train compete......"

In the train driver's account, Peter seems to have seen the race of the year, on the starting line, the horses are snorting and panting, and the train driver is lighting a fire in the hearth.

“…… When the signal was given, the horse galloped to a distance of more than a mile, when the train had just been pressurized, and then the locomotive spewed out a cloud of steam, and it flew after it, but only three or four miles before it caught up with the carriage. In the end, the train will naturally win, and the train must be ahead of the horse, after all, as long as the train has coal and water, it can keep going, but the horse can't, I tell you, in a few decades, every county in Daming will definitely have a train, I estimate that by that time, that is, the city can still see the public carriage, no, maybe the public carriage is gone. ”

The train driver looked in the direction of the city as if remembering something, and then said.

"I heard that Zhongdu has begun to build a subway, yes, it is a subway, it is said to be a railway that runs underground, specifically in the city, who knows? Maybe in a few decades, this subway will be running in this city......"

Subway!

Once again, Peter was stunned by the news he had just learned, and he, like all newcomers to the capital, was curious about the city.

In the 32 years of Xingqian, the capital grew faster than any other city in the history of mankind, and every day thousands of people came to the center of this vast empire by railroad and waterway, and the influx of large numbers of people also caused the city to expand rapidly, and when thousands of new houses, shops, office buildings, and factories were built for the growing army of labor, the city became increasingly crowded.

The population of Zhongdu is no less than two million!

This is an unprecedented number of people, and even though the old tiled houses replaced by three-story buildings provide enough housing for the influx of people, almost everyone who comes to Zhongdu feels the crowding of the city. Cities are expanding, but transportation is restricted. Public carriages, private carriages, and rail-powered cars are crowded on the crowded streets, and almost every day, all kinds of traffic accidents occur one after another.

Almost everyone is hungry for a new means of transportation!

Twenty-five years after the revival of the Qian, similar appeals appeared in the newspapers of major cities such as Zhongdu, Nanjing, Guangzhou, and Tianjin.

Build the railroad into the city!

Almost everybody has their eyes on the railroad and the train, but how do the trains run in the city? Although small steam locomotives were studied in an attempt to combine them with a rail-drawn carriage, this attempt was dashed by the congestion of the streets.

For the further development of the city, the current situation of transportation within the city must be improved. People need to have a better means of transportation than the narrow streets can provide.

It was at this time that a young man who had just graduated from Zhongshan Academy in Nanjing came up with an ambitious plan to design a railway underground in Zhongdu, which would allow people to travel farther into the city and avoid the congestion of the ground. And convenient transportation means that people can live farther away, people can have better living space, and the quality of life will be improved.

This young man, who had just graduated, began his campaign to get the consent of all parties. His appeal might have been ignored if it had been for an ordinary young man, who had a very special identity.

"Everyone said that because my father was the first general manager of the Royal Railways, and my brother was the squire of the Ministry of Works, Shuntianfu would agree to the request to build an underground railway, but in fact, it was nonsense!"

In the face of these visiting Russian envoys, Zhang Tingyu's tone was full of dissatisfaction, but he was only in his twenties, and he was obviously unwilling to "attribute" all this to his father and brother.

"The reason why Suncheonfu agreed to my request is because if the traffic problem in Jungdu is not solved, the city will fall into recession. Traffic problems have long been a key factor affecting urban development......"

Zhang Tingyu, who put things simply, did not say that he spent 2 years, spent all his spare time and almost all his salary, and conducted a comprehensive investigation of Zhongdu, and it was his investigation report that persuaded Shuntianfu. According to his statistics on the flow of people entering and leaving the Central Capital between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m., the results are astonishing: 200,000 people enter the Central Capital every day! Most of them walk from street to street. In addition, the public carriage is the most important means of transportation in the capital, 5,000 carriages carry 45,000 passengers, in comparison, only 32,000 people enter the capital by train, and another 30,000 people choose to take their own private carriages or rental carriages into the city, many wealthy people have their own carriages, which further causes the congestion of the city on the narrow roads crowded, every time the carriage passes, the entire road will be blocked.

Another trouble caused by horse-drawn carriages was that, as the number of horse-drawn carriages increased, hundreds of thousands of tons of horse manure were processed each year, which was practically worthless, and the price of selling to farmers as fertilizer was less than a hundred cents per tonne.

It was his investigation report that convinced Shuncheonfu to say that the bank's 200,000 people enter and leave Zhongdu every day, which means huge profits.

In the end, under the impetus of the banking community, Zhang Tingyu's efforts were not in vain, and the underground railway project in Zhongdu was approved by the imperial court, but as the promoter and inventor, he did not become the chief engineer, after all, he was still too young.

However, this does not prevent Zhongdu from promoting the subway project in Zhongdu, and now Metro Line 1 is actually a subway line extending from north to south along Suzaku Street, the central axis of Zhongdu.

Peter, who was in the crowd, looked at this young man of his own age, and his eyes were full of admiration.

"Your Excellency Engineer, how did you come up with the Underground Railroad?"

"It's simple, the revelation that the rat gave me."

Zhang Tingyu said proudly,

"When I was in school, I have been studying how to introduce the railway into the city and become a means of transportation in the city, but there are many problems that cannot be solved, at that time I even thought about putting the railway in a glass cover to form an arcade, so as to avoid the crowd of people, but this is not realistic, after all, there is no spacious place on the road for me to do that, once, I got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, and found a mouse hole in the corner of the wall, and all the way to the outside of the wall, there was a mouse running in and out of the hole. A thought popped into my mind. If a train enters a city and can't run on the ground, can it be allowed to go underground? Then, everything was simple, and after "putting the train in the ground" was a viable idea, I started lobbying and everything seemed to be going well......"

Zhang Tingyu's tone looked a little proud, he did have enough reasons to be proud, although he denied the reason for the family, but deep down he knew very well that if there was no family reason, he would not have been able to meet the senior officials of those banks, and without the support of the bank, this bold "wild dream" would not have become a reality.

Then Zhang Tingyu took these foreign guests to the construction site, and standing on the ground, he could clearly see hundreds of workers digging underground.

"You see that it is different from ordinary railway construction sites, workers have to dig a 10 fathoms (meters) wide and 6 fathoms deep trench from the ground, and then reinforce the ditch wall with bricks, and then build an arched brick roof, and then backfill the soil to rebuild the road on the ground, the reason why we choose Suzaku Street is that this street is the widest street in the Ming Dynasty, its width reaches 50 fathoms, and there is a 12-fathom-wide "promenade" in the middle, that is, the green space in the center of the street, the design of this promenade is very distinctive, that is, it separates the traffic flow, As the traffic volume continues to increase, the adjustable space of the road is guaranteed. The project was also carried out in conjunction with the widening of the street. ”

In Zhang Tingyu's explanation, Peter and others can clearly see the underground construction workers standing on it, with the efforts of thousands of workers, the 25-mile-long underground railway has shown its prototype, and when they continue to move forward, they arrive at a section of the subway that has been basically completed from the side of the ramp, and in the subway tunnel with a height of 5.2 fats and a width of 8.8 fathoms, Peter can see pillars of light shining into the tunnel through the sun.

"Your Excellency, how did the light shine through?"

Glancing at this tall, but curious Russian ** man, Zhang Tingyu explained.

"It is a ventilation hole, although the locomotive in the subway will use anthracite coal in the future, but it will still produce a lot of smoke, so in order to lead the smoke from the steam locomotive out of the ground, so it is necessary to leave the ventilation holes in advance, these ventilation holes can not only ensure the smoke discharge, but also allow the air to enter the tunnel, only in this way can the subway not be smoky."

In fact, when building this underground railway, which no one in the world has ever seen, newspapers in Zhongdu and even many places in Daming were suspicious of it, and even made various sarcastic sarcastic claims about it: for example, whether the tunnel would collapse, whether passengers would be poisoned by the smoke emitted by the train, and so on. And because people don't know what the return of money will be after the subway runs, investors are very cautious, if it weren't for the fact that Royal has become the largest investor, in the face of all kinds of doubts, maybe some people may even withdraw their investment. The only good thing is that although the subway has encountered some troubles such as groundwater during the excavation process, the overall implementation of the project has been very smooth.

Surrounded by the spacious underground tunnels, Peter's mood became a little strange, although he did not know that a year later, even before the subway was built, Ming Pao, the official newspaper of the Ming Dynasty, was still convinced that the citizens of Zhongdu would never take the subway, and they believed that even if the subway was built, it would be difficult to operate due to its high fares. Even people who think that the subway runs in a dirty and dark space, full of rats and surrounded by sewer pipes, will not give up riding in a horse-drawn carriage in a fresh environment in order to pass through this smoky tunnel. ”

In fact, soon after the subway was put into use, it was immediately sought after by the people and became the most important means of transportation in the central capital. And it's far more profitable than ordinary railways.

Of course, for all this, even Zhang Tingyu, as a designer, has no way to predict it. Like now he doesn't even know. Don't worry, it's already been targeted by the Russians.

Almost immediately after he finished introducing the Underground Railway to these guests from Russia. An invitation was sent to him.

"What to go to Russia? Where to build a railway? ”

Faced with this sudden invitation, Zhang Tingyu was a little surprised. But after a moment he asked rhetorically.

"Of course, there is no problem with going to Russia to build a railway, but do you know what it takes to build a railway? Every mile of railway costs tens of thousands of taels of silver, can Russia afford all this with its financial resources? ”

Zhang Tingyu's rhetorical question, the Russians present all fell silent. Even Peter. When he was in Russia, he had heard the saying that the railroads were paved with silver.

Now the finances of Russia. Can you afford to build a railway?

At this moment, Zhang Tingyu's words made him see hope again.

"Maybe you can consider applying for a loan in Daming and using Daming's loan to build a railway."