After all, Zhang Yan is the empress dowager. Her reserve makes it impossible for her to cross the boundaries between her and Li Guodong, but she has a kind of admiration for this man from the bottom of her heart. So no matter what Li Guodong wants to do, she will support her to a great extent.

The Beijing-Shanghai Railway Project has entered the preliminary preparations. Because this railway is not favored by the gentry, it is just a wholly-owned railway in the Ming Dynasty.

The person who surveyed the route was not Li Guodong, but the person who carriages in the Qi family. Of course, the requirements for the route were still proposed by Li Guodong. He required that the minimum turning radius of the route should not be less than two miles, and the maximum slope should not be greater than four thousandths. However, in Jiangnan, the slope requirements are very simple, and they are all flat land with almost no ups and downs. Only when you are about to reach Nanjing will there be a little mountain.

However, the line must have a roadbed to raise it, which requires three feet above the ground. The main purpose of raising it is to prevent flooding.

Regarding the requirements for tracks, Li Guodong did not plan to use iron plates to lay iron plates on wooden tracks, but directly built a real railway using railway tracks at one time. This is in the long run. Once the steam engine that can be used to drive vehicles and ships is successfully developed, the train can be directly driven onto this railway.

The land acquisition cost of that year was almost negligible for building a railway, and the terrain between Shanghai and Ningxia was flat, so there was no need to consider railway tunnels that could not be completed by technology back then. But the most cost was to spend on building bridges.

When choosing a line, it is mainly to choose places that are easy to build bridges as much as possible.

From Shanghai to Zhenjiang, the passage sections are crisscrossing rivers. The larger rivers include Suzhou River, Grand Canal, and countless small rivers. Basically, each mile has to pass through more than two rivers. This railway needs to pass through hundreds of rivers of all sizes, which brings difficulties to construction.

The construction of the bridge is a control project of the railway. Considering that the construction of this railway is extremely difficult, Li Guodong agreed to the application of the Qi brothers to build the railway line from Shanghai Station to Wusongkou.

Although the line from Shanghai to Wusongkou is short, it has great significance. It is a railway connecting the port and an experimental railway.

The railway construction began, and the workers began to work enthusiastically. The first one was to build the Shanghai Station. This station is located north of the Suzhou River. The reason why it is located in the north is that from here to Wusongkou, there is no need to build a large bridge.

"Does the platform need to be built that long? Our car only has three sections at most, so is it too long, right?" Qi Lisun asked, looking at the one-mile-long platform.

Li Guodong replied: "At present, our car is pulled by Malay, so it only has two to three sections. But in the future, when Song Shangshu's steam engine is made, the length of the car can reach more than ten sections or even more than twenty sections. If the platform is repaired shortly now, it will take more money to go through the work in the future."

The first thing to be built is the roadbed. The road site has been selected, and the work of expropriating land around is very simple. Anyway, there is no farmland around. The original farmland was bought by merchants and kept in their hands and waited for the price to rise before selling. The construction of a railway does not require too much land, so the court gave the merchants who were expropriated land compensation at market prices.

After choosing the road site, the workers began to dig earth to raise the roadbed. Because this section of the road passed through the city area afterwards, the roadbed was not too high, and it was a little more than one foot above the ground, so the construction project volume was much simpler.

At the same time, Shanghai Iron and Steel Plant is also working hard to produce railway tracks, preparing to be put into the first railway.

After the roadbed is raised, the tracks are laid after compaction.

Sleepers are placed on the roadbed, and then the rails are fixed to the sleepers. Finally, gravel is poured into the gap between the sleepers, so that the track laying project is completed. But there is another problem, because the car is pulled by a horse, wooden boards must be laid on the sleepers to facilitate the horses to walk.

The Songhu Railway was completed, and two carriages were transported to the railway. At this time, the Shanghai Station had also been completed. This was a four-story station building. The waiting room was on the first floor, with six platforms and eleven roads. Except for the two railway lines that were prepared to lead to Wusongkou, which were through the station and were ready to connect the Beijing-Shanghai Railway and the Songhu Railway, the other nine roads were at the end. After arriving at the Shanghai Station, it ended and adopted an island-style platform.

This design is completely based on the design drawings of Shanghai Laobei Station that Li Guodong remembers.

A vehicle yard, a locomotive yard, locomotive garage and steering wheel were built next to the railway line towards Nanjing. The locomotive yard was equipped with a device for adding coal and water. After the locomotive arrived at the Shanghai Station, it drove back to the steering wheel, turned the direction, then entered the yard, added water and coal, and then repaired for several hours. When leaving, it went back and hung on the car. But that was all in the future, and there was no steam engine yet.

Two huge carriages are parked on Platform No. 6. This carriage is very large, weighing more than 50,000 kilograms. Because it is an open kilogram, the carriage is a giant close to thirty tons. The width of the carriage is one meter wide, and the width of the gauge is only more than four feet. Therefore, the width of the carriage is wider than the bogie, and the length of the car is seven meter. Such a huge vehicle is equivalent to a ship on land.

Four stout Sharmas were led to the front of the carriage, and people hung the horses on the carriage with cables.

Each carriage can carry more than 100 people, and two carriages have pulled more than 200 people.

The bell for the departure of "Dangdang" sounded, and a coachman sitting in front of the first carriage waved his whip to drive away the Sharma. The huge Sharma could pull five-ton road vehicles with one horse, and four were enough to pull twenty-ton road vehicles. However, the friction of vehicles on the railway was even smaller. Four Sharmas pulled two cars with a total weight of more than 60 tons, and it was still very easy to run.

The speed of the car is not very fast, which is twenty miles per hour. The speed is slow and the car is easy to brake, so the car will not slide forward after the horse stops, causing the vehicle to hit the horse.

The whole journey took more than 40 miles, and the vehicle walked for about an hour. After changing horses halfway, it finally arrived at the terminal Wusongkou Station.

"Before the birth of the steam engine, it would be very unprofitable if it was a horse to pull a vehicle from Shanghai to Nanjing. It would be a horse that changed once in just over 40 miles. How many times would it take for more than 600 miles?" Li Guodong shook his head.

Although the Sharma is a kind of horse pulling horse, the price of this kind of horse is not cheap. It takes more than 600 miles from Shanghai to Nanjing. It takes 50 miles to change horses every time, and six horses are required to be pulled by one horse. There are twelve horses on the way! In other words, a train from Shanghai to Nanjing requires 72 Sharmas, which is much more expensive than a steam locomotive! The Sharma is an excellent horse pulling horse, and its mission should be towing cannons.

Although it was calculated that the Beijing-Shanghai Railway, which used horses to pull carts, Li Guodong still planned to invest money in the construction of this railway, because the development of the steam engine had already achieved results.

At this time, Song Yingxing changed the gun barrel into a cylinder, and the simple steam engine he built could run for ten minutes. Although it could only run for ten minutes, this was already a great achievement. I believe that in the future, he could build a steam engine that could be put into practice. At that time, a real train would be born.

Building the railway in advance also puts pressure on Song Yingxing and the others to build practical steam engines as soon as possible.
Chapter completed!