Speaking of railways and steam engines, Li Xuan began to pay attention to them very early, the Royal Institute of Technology had not yet been established, but when it was a young military camp, Li Xuan had already instructed several senior students of the Zhaoqing General Camp of the young military camp at that time to start presiding over the research and development of the steam engine.

At the same time, the design and development of railways began!

The design and development of the railway is not much of a problem, soon in the Guangzhou business zone trial, and finally gradually rolled out to the major ports, industrial areas, mining areas, although are some short-distance railways, the length is generally a few kilometers, the shortest is only a few hundred meters, the longest is the mining railway in the Dangtu Industrial Zone, in order to pull the iron ore from the mine back to the steel plant, Jiangnan Iron and Steel Plant specially built a mining railway about 12 kilometers long.

From the design and construction of the railway, in fact, there is no technical problem, that is, the rails need a lot of steel, and the steel production in these years is still relatively low, the price of steel is generally expensive, so the price of the rails for the construction of the railway is also relatively high, which promotes the construction cost of the railway is relatively high.

At the same time, the vehicles running on these railways are all horse-drawn carriages, not trains in the usual sense of later generations, most of these carriages are pulled by horses, and there is generally only one carriage, not that more or larger carriages cannot be built, the carriage is actually a frame plus iron wheels, and the shock absorption problem that existed in the past does not exist because of the emergence of springs, therefore, there is no technical obstacle to the construction of carriages.

There is only one reason why there is only one carriage, and the general construction is relatively short, that is, there are too many carriages, too many loads, and the horses can't pull it!

The obstacle that hindered the emergence of trains, the massive application of rail vehicles, was not rail technology, nor carriage technology, but the problem of power.

The Royal Institute of Technology has been tossing and turning for so many years, and the experiments have been done one after another, but still there is still no high-pressure steam engine to come out, and without a high-pressure steam engine, there is no way to use the steam engine as a train power.

Nowadays, the low-pressure steam engines used in industrial applications, although the technology has been relatively mature, began to be used in large-scale factories in large quantities, and there is a great drive to completely replace hydrodynamics, but the volume and weight of these low-pressure steam engines are still relatively large.

In the early years, the navy did not give up, and tried to install this kind of low-pressure steam engine on some ships, and really installed it for them to use it for a while, but less than a year later, these low-pressure steam engines were all dismantled.

There is no way, the power of these low-pressure steam engines is too small, and the weight and volume are too large, and they have no effect at all when they are installed on the ship, and the sea is extremely turbulent, and these low-pressure steam engines with huge volume and very large weight frequently fail, and finally the navy gritted its teeth and directly dismantled them all.

If you want to use the steam engine as the power of ships and rail vehicles, its power must be greatly increased, and at the same time, the volume and weight must also be greatly reduced, and there is only one way to do this, that is, to increase the steam pressure and make a high-pressure steam engine.

However, the demand for high-pressure steam engines for materials and processing is too high, and with the current industrial heritage of the Tang Empire, it still can't be built, even in the laboratory.

Therefore, there is no choice but to continue to invest in the research and development of various new materials and processing technologies.

When the materials and processing technology have passed, the high-pressure steam engine can be made, as for now, it still can't work.

However, Li Xuan felt that even if the high-pressure steam engine could not be built now, it was necessary to build some relatively long railways in a certain specific area.

Railways are also okay to use horses as power, but the big deal is that the transportation volume is less.

This kind of long-distance railway, because the transportation volume is relatively small, the operating cost is relatively high, so if it is purely used for commercial use, if it is not built in a more prosperous area, it may be more cost-effective.

The more suitable place is estimated to be in the Zhili area, because this area has a large number of freight and passenger flow needs, even if there is a Yangtze River, there are many water networks, but there is still a very huge demand for road transportation, before the use of various types of carriages as road transportation.

If there is a long-distance railway, it should be at a loss, even if it is pulled by horses.

But if it is in the northern region, and it is still on the border and the grassland, it is estimated that it will be a loss to vomit blood.

But the northern steppes need railways, and more military needs.

As for military needs, it is not simply a matter of cost, but of whether there is a problem.

Therefore, after seeing the battle report of the Ninth Army, Li Xuan planned to build a military railway in the northern grassland, relying on the railway to quickly realize the transportation of soldiers and materials, and help the empire completely control the northern grassland.

However, before building a railway in the north, Li Xuan still planned to test it in the Zhili area.

Therefore, he summoned the responsible officials of the Ministry of Industry, the Ministry of Commerce and other relevant departments to formally discuss the big railway plan that the Ministry of Industry would propose every year and would be rejected every year.

In the past few years, the Ministry of Industry has proposed to build long-distance railways in certain areas every year, and there are various plans, including the railway from Shanghai to Jinling City, the railway from Dangtu to Jinling City, and the railway from Jinling City to Fengyang and even to Xuzhou.

There are also plans for a railway from Hangzhou to Shanghai.

In short, there were all kinds of railway plans, but they were all rejected without exception, because these railway plans required millions of taels of silver or even more casually, and the imperial finances could not afford it at all.

But what the officials of the Ministry of Industry did not expect was that this time, it was the Son of Heaven who took the initiative to convene important ministers to discuss the plan for the big railway.

This made the officials of the Ministry of Industry ecstatic, and in order to ensure that the big railway project could be carried out smoothly, the officials of the Ministry of Industry were also quite well prepared, and they eliminated some flashy plans on their own.

Finally, a railway construction plan was presented to the Son of Heaven!

The plan is called the Jiangnan Railway, this Jiangnan is not Jiangnan Road, but the south of the Yangtze River, the overall plan is to start from Jiujiang Province, through Chizhou Mansion, Taiping Mansion, Chengtian Mansion, Zhenjiang Mansion, Changzhou Mansion, Suzhou Mansion, Songjiang Mansion, Jiaxing Mansion, Hangzhou Mansion.

This will be a super railway with a length of thousands of kilometers, and some branch lines will be built to connect it.

However, the people of the Ministry of Industry also know that this kind of large railway plan cannot be successfully built in a short period of time, so what they put forward is a long-term plan, and the specific construction in the near future is one of the sections, that is, the section from Jinling City to Zhenjiang, the design route of this section is about 70 kilometers long, and the medium-term plan is the Beijing-Shanghai Railway, from Jinling City to Shanghai, about 300 kilometers long.

But even in the early stage, the Jingzhen Railway, which was about 70 kilometers long, was not so easy to build.

This kind of railway is different from the short-distance port railway, mining area railway, the above railways are relatively short, even if the unit cost is high, but the total cost is limited, and most of them are areas with very strong freight demand, and there is no worry about profits after construction.

However, this kind of long-distance railway is very troublesome to build.

The Ministry of Industry estimates that the total investment in the construction of the Beijing-Shanghai Railway will be at least 8 million taels of silver!

With such a large investment, the empire's finances simply cannot support it, so it must be thought of otherwise.

At the cabinet meeting, Li Xuan simply proposed the establishment of the Datang Railway Company, with the company as the main body for building and operating the railway.

The company must be controlled by the Ministry of State-owned Enterprises, and part of the equity can be appropriately transferred through listing in the future, but the controlling stake must be controlled by the Ministry of State-owned Enterprises.

The construction funds in the early stage can be collected by the company by issuing corporate bonds and bank loans, while the central government will give certain financial subsidies.

Although the Ministry of State-owned Enterprises will control the enterprise, there are many enterprises controlled by the Ministry of State-owned Enterprises, and each of them is basically engaged in commercial activities in accordance with commercial rules, and the official will not interfere.

The personal decision of the Son of Heaven, others naturally did not dare to have any nonsense, and soon finalized the relevant regulations, in order to raise funds and expand influence, the Tang Dynasty newspaper also officially published the news of the establishment of the Datang Railway Company.

It's a pity that people in these years still don't know about the new thing of the railway, and few people will invest rashly, although the railways in the Tang Dynasty have appeared for many years, but people have the impression that this kind of railway should exist in ports and mining areas for short-distance transportation, but how to make a profit by directly building a railway with hundreds of kilometers of field?

The operating costs of railways are very high, compared with river transport and sea transport, there is no advantage at all, at least for the time being, in this case, how can railways compete with river transport?

With so much development of Yangtze River shipping, can this railway compete for shipping across the Yangtze River?

A lot of people are skeptical!

Many of the medium- and large-scale shipping companies that operate the Yangtze River shipping have come out to belittle the railway for their own interests, and they have made bold claims that this railway will definitely die under the competition of the Yangtze River shipping in the end.

Even if the railroad company preaches that it can use steam engine trains for a few years, it will still kill them!

Why? Your train will be powered by a steam engine, but our ships won't be able to use it?

If everyone uses it, how can you fight the freight cost with me?

When the time comes, we will definitely have to hang the rail transportation.

Any stupid fork who dares to invest in railways will definitely have no inner treasury left!