The port of Rio Gallegos in the southern Patagonia region, now called Xingnan Port, was named by Mo Ming, the new president of the Southern Railway Company, which has a double meaning: one is to imply the revitalization of the new territory in the south of the East Coast Republic of China, and the other is to revitalize the Southern Railway Company.

The planned port city is located on the southern bank of the Hungam River (Gallegos), where the seasonal river Chico meets it. Although the annual precipitation is less than 300 millimeters, there is no shortage of fresh water resources at all, and the land on both sides of the river has been cut by the river for tens of millions of years, with more fine grains and more nutrients, and the prospects for agricultural development are quite good.

However, before agriculture can be developed, the most important thing to do here is to build a decent port. The main task of the Southern Railway Company was to build a railway between the city of Araukan and the port of Xingnan, and the company's business activities were carried out around this point. If it's just to make a fortune, then why should the Southern Railway Company get into this corner, Madagascar has a lot of opportunities, it's better to invest there than in Southern Patagonia, a place where birds don't, and I don't know when it will be profitable.

Nowadays, there are not many people who are optimistic about the Southern Railway Company in the East Coast, which can be seen from the cold sales of the company's public bonds in the Qingdao market, and the 10-year corporate bonds have only been sold out of 48,000 yuan in a scattered manner, which is extremely disappointing. As of February 28, 1649, only 8.29% of the 40% shares sold in the market had been sold, raising 829,000 yuan.

Among them, East Coast Company has become the largest investor of China Southern Railway Company except the government with an investment of 300,000 yuan (equity ratio of 3%); Furthermore. The Almeida family in Brazil invested 200,000 yuan. 2% of the shares; The Doria family of Genoa invested one million bank lira. 1.64% of the shares; Chuangji Investment Company (the main shareholders are Li Guo, Gao Yigong, Yuan Zongdi, Guo Sheng, Mo Ming and others, and the legal representative is Li Zhengang) invested 100,000 yuan, accounting for 1% of the shares.

Aside from these shares, the rest are scattered private minority shareholders. Among them, the most famous was the well-known private of Mo Ming Mo Dashuai, who took out 20,000 yuan in cash and borrowed 20,000 yuan from the Banco de la Plata with the main assets in his name, the Haidiao Watch Factory and the Bee Island in New Huaxia Bay (renting bees for breeding bees), and the Chuangji Investment Company also provided him with an interest-free loan of 10,000 yuan. In this way, an investment of 50,000 yuan was made up to value 0.5% of the shares of the Southern Railway Company.

A private person invested 50,000 yuan in a project, and this kind of extravagance almost blinded everyone's eyes. However, this is not the most jealous, the most difficult thing for the civil officials in the Government Council is that it has been rumored that Mo Ming may not need a loan at all and can directly take out 50,000 yuan in cash to invest in the Southern Railway Company. He may have gone to such great lengths just to not stimulate the many people in the country, and he has really made a fortune in the more than five years he has been in the Far East! You can see the big boxes he brought back, it is said that they are not filled with books at all, but full of gold, jewelry, jade and antiques, and the wealth of eunuchs. Outsiders simply can't imagine it.

In addition to Mo Ming, about 0.15% of the remaining shares (worth 15,000 yuan) were subscribed by many small investors in China. The sale of shares raised 829,000 yuan, and government investment (excluding in-kind investment. cash investment only) of 200,000 yuan, and a financial subsidy of 100,000 yuan for 48 years was also issued; The sale of corporate bonds received 48,000 yuan, and a total of 1,177,000 yuan, the Southern Railway Company began its own plan with such a seemingly considerable amount of money.

The company's first project was to lose money -- well, at least it doesn't look like it could make money in the short term, and the company was carrying too much on its back – and that was to build a decent wharf at the mouth of the Gallegos River for large ships from the mainland.

The main body of the port of Hungnam is located on the south bank of the Gallegos River, which is surveyed by the Navy to be the best place on the seabed, and it is not a problem to berth transport ships with a draft of 3-4 meters, which is currently the dominant port in the country. The climate here is also relatively warm in the whole of Southern Patagonia, with a minimum temperature of minus 20 degrees Celsius in winter, around mid-July to early August, when there will be some thin floating ice in the sea surface of the harbor, but it is basically not hindered to navigation.

In addition, if dredgers are used to dredge the bottom of the river and the seabed in the future, and large ships frequently enter and leave the port, the freezing of the sea will be greatly changed. In other words, the more ships come in and out, the harder it is for the sea to freeze and the more valuable the port becomes.

Most of the wind blows from the western land, especially in winter, when the cold westerly wind is accompanied by snow, and visibility in the harbor is low and it is difficult for ships to dock. At this time, facilities such as breakwaters, lighthouses, and high-level permanent piers are extremely important.

However, after the preliminary calculation, Mo Ming, as the president of the Southern Railway Company, immediately vetoed some of the very expensive projects, such as the 3.8-kilometer-long main breakwater - because the winter tide off the port of Xingnan Port is very high, it is necessary to build a high-standard breakwater, otherwise ships will be affected by some bad weather when berthing; For example, the construction of three 360-meter-long masonry and cement permanent wharves on the south side of the Xingnan River with a water depth of 4 meters was also modified by Mo Ming's intervention: the cement permanent wharves were replaced with wooden wharves that were prone to corrosion and high maintenance costs to save pre-construction costs.

In addition, a wooden trestle 180 meters long and 15 meters wide was built on the left side of the mouth of the Chico River at a depth of 7 meters (to moor ships with a deep draft, such as battleships), and a large dock with a length of 200 meters (for repairing ships). These two projects really can't be saved, especially the shipyard is quite critical, because the ability to maintain and overhaul the ships is very important for a port.

In addition, there are 10 kilometers of Lingang freight road, freight yard and warehouse (about 43,000 square meters of buildings), open storage yard (70,000 square meters), coal storage yard (15,000 square meters), railway station and its ancillary facilities (4,000 square meters). Due to the port's most important function (transshipment of migrants), a large passenger waiting room, terminal management, health care, fresh water supply, and so on will be built here.

Finally, as a terminal, its material handling and transshipment equipment must also be added, which is another large investment. For example, flatbed railcars (iron wheels, weighing 5.75 tons) for short-distance transshipment of goods, large steam cranes, steam tugboats that may be needed for large ships docking and offshore, steam water supply ships, steam coal supply ships, disinfection ships, small ice repellent ships (to expel thinner small ice floes), etc.

Overall, if it is completed according to the original design plan, then the port of Xingnan is indeed the most advanced in the country on the east coast in terms of modernization. Perhaps it is not the largest in China in terms of scale (the cargo capacity of the first phase of the project is 25,000 tons, and the maximum annual cargo throughput is 300,000 tons), but because it uses a large number of new equipment and new technologies that represent the most advanced scientific and technological achievements of the east coast today, its modernization process and transshipment efficiency are undoubtedly the highest.

But the plan also has a fatal flaw, that is, the cost is conservatively estimated to be more than $3 million - an extremely staggering figure. Therefore, the high construction cost doomed Xingnan Port to reduce the specifications and extend the completion deadline, so that the Southern Railway Company could rebuild and expand it after the financial resources of the Southern Railway Company were sufficient. Therefore, under the guidance of this line of thinking, Mo Ming, who served as the first president of the Southern Railway Company, extended the construction completion plan of Xingnan Port to ten years with a stroke of his pen, and the investment in the first year was only 200,000 yuan.

It's not that he doesn't want to build a high-standard port once and for all, but that the funds available to the Southern Railway Company are really not very large. Xingnan Port invested 200,000 yuan in the first year, and the investment in Araukan Port (Natales) will also reach nearly 300,000 yuan, and the two ports at both ends of the two-ocean railway will spend 500,000 yuan a year on the construction costs, which Nima has consumed half of the 1.177 million yuan in the company's account, and the rest of the money will be used in many places, how to pay it!

Could it be that the company has just been established and started to invest, and it is going to go out again? Mo Ming shook his head and decided not to think about this issue for now, what he needed to think about now was how to feed the new immigrants of this year who were about to be stuffed over from the mainland. These new immigrants, numbering more than 1,000 people, almost all of them Ming men, will settle down along the river in the port of Khingnam, and then use the abundant fresh water resources and fertile river valley silt land to grow crops and raise livestock, so as to make agriculture as good as possible, and save all the supplies from the mainland, which can save a lot of money.

In addition to the new immigrants, there is another special group of people who will arrive at the port of Hungnam in a few days, that is, the 240 officers and soldiers of the 101st Company of the former Army who have just been laid off. These people were sacrificed as bargaining chips in the game between the military and civilian officials, but according to the compromise plan between the two sides, these people could even carry weapons and be integrated into the road escort team of the Southern Railway Company as a whole, which was used to protect the interests of the Southern Railway Company from being harmed during the development process - of course, their future salaries and maintenance costs will be fully paid by the Southern Railway Company. (To be continued......)