"Woo......" The shrill train whistle sounded, and a train full of goods slowly stopped in Hejinbao Station. With the stationmaster's order, a group of station workers who had been waiting for a long time immediately rushed forward and began the intense unloading of materials. This truck is loaded with all kinds of things, including coking coal required by the Tieling Special Steel Plant, salted fish and cured meat transported from coastal areas, and a large number of mechanical equipment and parts.

After these things are unloaded in the station, the workers will immediately transfer them to the wharf on the other side of the Heihe River by ferry, where they will be loaded onto another train, and finally transported to Chengshanbao and Tielingbao, two places where all kinds of supplies are urgently needed. It can be seen that without the extension of the railway, it is unthinkable to build an industrial city in the hinterland, and the huge amount of materials alone is enough to squeeze the transportation potential of a small country like the east coast.

However, with the advent of railways, the vast and fertile inland area was opened to the people of the East Coast. Don't you see that most of the colonizers of Western countries today are stuck in the coastal areas of their respective colonies, allowing the inland areas to sleep there? The reason for this is not that they do not want to develop, but that they are really powerless in the interior with limited manpower. For example, the East Coast, which has developed into the third generation, has a total cargo capacity of more than 120 tons and an average speed of more than 35 kilometers per hour, which can pull a large number of people and materials from the coastal areas to the inland hinterland hundreds of kilometers away in one breath.

It is now September 1649, and the Northwest Railway has repaired Chengshan Fort, and is now advancing to Tieling Fort, the end point of the railway. It is expected that by the end of this year, the entire line of this artery level railway will be completed. Connecting the coal, gold, iron ore, and special steel and machining bases of the Tieling Mining District with the core area of the East Coast. Since then, he has continuously contributed to the development of the Eastern Republic of China.

In view of the fact that the population of the seven towns along the railway line is not very surplus and the economic strength is also very average, the State Railway Administration has not yet thought of re-aligning this railway. Compared to the 180-kilometer-long Rome Line, which has been double-tracked, the Northwest Railway will have a hard time breaking even in the shortest time it can be expected. There is no hope of making a profit unless the state continues to carry out major migration here for many years – and indeed the Ministry of Immigration is preparing to do so – and revitalize the economy here. But even then, it will take years, in that time. The Northwest Railway can only be maintained by state subsidies until the population and economy of the towns and villages along the route reach a critical point.

However, there is still a hidden concern for this railway line, that is, the section of the Heihe River west of Hejin Fort, which spans more than 40 meters. As we all know, the railway bridge and the ordinary highway bridge are completely two levels, it has to bear the impact force, shear force is far stronger than the low-speed, low-load state of the wooden bridge, stone bridge is many times stronger, if the bridge material is not good, it is a collapse of the end.

When the previous railway was built to Hejinbao, the State Railway Administration had actually considered building a railway bridge over the Heihe River. Because if there is no railway bridge, all the materials transported in the direction of Chengshan and Tieling will have to be loaded and unloaded at the Hejinbao wharf, which not only increases a lot of workload. More importantly, the transportation efficiency is greatly reduced, which is undoubtedly unbearable for the Northwest Reclamation Bureau.

And after the State Administration of Railways announced that the construction of the railway bridge would be temporarily abandoned. Ma Jia, chairman of the Northwest Reclamation Bureau, was immediately dissatisfied. For this reason, he specially led a group of people to inspect and collect materials at the ferries on both sides of Hejinbao, and then went directly to the Executive Committee and the State Railway Administration, asking them to transfer professional and technical personnel and allocate additional special funds to strive to build this railway bridge in the shortest possible time so as to ensure the transportation efficiency of the Northwest Railway.

Soon, the princes of the Executive Committee finally agreed to build the Heihe Bridge, a railway bridge capable of carrying 120 tons of trains. To be honest, the difficulty of this railway bridge is not in the piers, but in the material of the bridge deck, more precisely, the deck that bears the load must be made of very tough materials. As for the bridge piers, there are not so strict requirements, to say that it is difficult to hear, even if the wooden piers can last for a long time, the technical difficulties are mainly in the bridge deck material.

After demonstration, the technicians of the State Administration of Railways decided to customize various types of wrought iron parts in the comprehensive workshop of the Dayuhe Arsenal, and then connect them with fasteners such as guò screws and buckles. As for why you don't use steel, I'm sorry, the East Coast hasn't lit up the steel rolling tech tree yet, so it can't be used. As for cast steel, some of the rails on the east coast in the early days were indeed cast steel, but because the castability of the steel was not good and the quality was not stable enough, the current mass production of rails has long been completely switched to cast iron.

Wrought iron parts are all forged by steam hammers, which are quite expensive due to the special size of the various parts and the small quantities produced. I believe that if it weren't for the big face of the vest, this railway bridge might be difficult to build. According to the preliminary calculation of 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, and if the construction process is not smooth, it is not impossible for the total cost to exceed 100,000 yuan.

Tens of thousands of dollars of silver were used to build a bridge, and if the people in the War Department knew about it, it would not be a big deal! They have now been forced to dismantle several infantry artillery companies, and their financial situation is relatively embarrassing, but they did not expect that the white shirts are so extravagant, and a bridge will cost tens of thousands of yuan, and it is estimated that there will be trouble in the future.

Regardless, the construction of the Heihe Bridge is crucial to improving the transportation efficiency of the Northwest Railway. At present, the bridge has entered the stage of full construction, and the construction team of the State Railway Administration has picked up some of the shallows in the center of the Heihe River, and then used them as places for the placement of bridge piers. After conducting field surveys, senior researcher Viviani, who is engaged in mathematical research at the Academy of Natural Sciences, built a construction team to install a bridge pier every 6-8 meters (every 6 meters for the railway bridge built by Japan in Korea at the end of the 19th century) to distribute the force as much as possible and ensure the safety of the bridge.

However, after the number of bridge piers increased, it also brought some trouble to the flood discharge of the Heihe River, which had already erupted in the autumn of this year when the autumn rain continued. As a result of the construction of settlements, railways, roads, stations and docks, forests have been cut down in the upper and lower reaches of the Heihe River, wetlands that were used as flood reservoirs have been filled in, and the construction of the Heihe Bridge has had a negative impact on downstream flooding, with a flood in the vicinity of Hejinbao in May. The flood washed away a village near the riverbank, swept away more than a dozen villagers and dozens of livestock, and some sleepers stored on the docks were carried far downstream, a considerable loss if you include the submerged farmland.

Although the flood was affected by extremely heavy precipitation – more than 200 millimetres more than last year – the risk of flooding has been exacerbated by increasingly frequent human activities. For example, the residents of Hejinbao like to grow soybeans, which can easily lead to siltation of wetlands; Another example is the loss of the natural storage function of wetlands in order to widen the channel of the Heihe River, which leads to changes in the area inundated by floods, thus exacerbating flood disasters. All in all, the flood disaster is a wake-up call for the people of the East Coast, who have been developing on a large scale over the years, to take more into account environmental factors when carrying out development and construction activities, so as not to cause great disasters to their lives in the future.

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 worked out a huge artificial reservoir plan. They decided to convert some of the wetlands on both sides of the Heihe River into artificial reservoirs, and to regulate the water storage capacity through the guò artificial reservoirs, so that the swampy wetlands that were drained in the process could be filled in with confidence and boldly used for arable land. These are very fertile shallow silt, and good fertilizer materials should be good if you use them to grow cereals or soybeans.

In addition to this, the Heihe riverbed 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, which will affect shipping and water storage capacity after a long time. The people of the east coast are basically familiar with these things, and the towns and villages in various places generally organize the people in their areas to dig rivers during the dry season (which happens to be the slack season) every winter, and almost all of them have become a fixed project in the rural areas everywhere. This kind of large-scale infrastructure construction is generally regarded as a form of forced labor, because the local government does not pay anyone, and in some places even requires the villagers to bring their own meals. But in general, everyone has little resistance to this kind of project, because isn't the facility 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. Instead of spending days and nights on the eastern seaboard to buy a few beautiful clothes, the local residents no longer have to worry about the food they harvest being smashed in their hands because of transportation bottlenecks, and the railways have brought them everything including daily necessities, luxury goods, production tools and even department stores. They just need to live quietly in the quiet inland villages, and then enjoy the dividends brought to them by the country's industrial and technological progress. (To be continued......)