Late Yuan Dynasty: I am the true emperor

Chapter 586 Finally, they got rid of the horse's rump.
The reason for using steel rails weighing 50 kilograms per meter is that lightweight steel rails have poor load-bearing capacity.

Historically, early railway rails were indeed relatively light, but the trains at that time were also very light. It was rare for the locomotive to weigh more than ten tons, and the traction capacity and speed were also pitifully small.

Before 1835, 'planetary' locomotives were still in common use in Europe and North America. These locomotives weighed only six or seven tons and could pull at most a few dozen tons, running at a speed of about 25 kilometers per hour.

Planetary locomotives have only four wheels, a very simple locomotive head, and no cab. Regardless of the weather, the driver drives in the open, which is even more arduous than driving a horse-drawn carriage. According to the configuration at the time, it was common for a locomotive to have six larger 'four-wheeled carriages' attached to it. These things could not carry much, so it was natural to use lighter steel rails.

But from a modern perspective, the planetary locomotive is just a big toy. In a small European country, it could be laid for a hundred or two hundred kilometers, hauling tens of tons at a time, and running at a speed similar to a horse-drawn carriage. At the time, those Europeans, who were not very knowledgeable, were quite satisfied with that.

However, if you put this thing in China? Without even thinking about it, those pedantic scholars would definitely call it a strange and ingenious trick.

Why? Because even the ancient Chinese didn't think much of this kind of railway. The territory of ancient China was much larger than that of small European countries, and ancient China had a very developed water transportation system. This was different from the situation in Europe, where there were few canals and a pressing need for land transportation.

Take the railway that Lu Jin is planning this time, from Nanjing to Jingxian County, Anhui Province, for example. It's only because Lu Jin is willing to pay for it himself that he would agree to it. If you asked Li Shanchang and his group to pay for the railway, they would never agree to it.

Jingxian County is located right on the banks of the Qingyi River. The coal mined there could be directly loaded onto ships and transported downstream to the Yangtze River, then all the way to Dangtu and Nanjing. Water transportation was extremely convenient. Why would anyone spend millions of taels of silver to build a railway to haul coal from Jingxian? Only someone with a screw loose would do something like that.
What, you're saying we won't build this road, but in another direction? Where can we build it then?

Going to Hangzhou? There's the Grand Canal; you can take a boat from Zhenjiang directly to Hangzhou. Going to Hefei? There's the Ruxu River, Chaohu Lake, and Feishui River; these aren't just existing waterways, but boats can take you directly into Hefei city. Going to Henan? There are the Ying River, Wo River, and Huai River; you can take a boat directly to Kaifeng city. Going to Guangzhou? There's the Ling Canal you can use!

Go to Dadu? There's the Grand Canal there too. We can just spend a few hundred thousand taels of silver to dredge it. Li Shanchang and the others would probably agree to that.

Then, standing in Nanjing and looking around, you can't help but marvel at how incredibly developed China's water network is. How come there are waterways everywhere?

This brings us to our fascinating ancestors. From King Fuchai of Wu during the Spring and Autumn Period, they began digging the Han Canal. Qin Shi Huang then dug the Ling Canal. Emperor Yang of Sui opened the Grand Canal. The Song Dynasty dredged the waterway from Jiangnan to Kaifeng. They were still digging in the Yuan Dynasty, which killed countless people, and they dug a new Grand Canal (Eastern Line).
So in this situation, if you were to bring out that early European planetary-type wagon that could only carry six carriages, was slower than a horse, and could only pull a few dozen tons, the entire court and those 'great scholars' in the countryside would only be terrified.

That's it, the Ming Dynasty is doomed! It's only been four years since the founding of the dynasty, and the emperor is already indulging in frivolous pursuits. You spent millions of taels of silver on this huge toy? With that money, wouldn't it be better to dig a canal? If you really have money to burn, you could at least give us officials some bonuses.
What are these dilapidated European trains? Only those ignorant bumpkins from remote Western villages would treat them like treasures. Have they ever seen how to transport millions of bushels of grain two thousand miles away at once? Even their king probably never saw so much grain in his entire life, let alone organized its transport.

To put it nicely, he was a king of Europe; to put it bluntly, what a load of rubbish king he was, his actual territory wasn't even as big as a single province in China.

Even if you actually built the railway between Nanjing and Beijing, using planetary locomotives to transport six million shi of grain from Nanjing to Beijing, it would take at least 5000 trains bumping along for half a month, and the efficiency wouldn't necessarily be much higher than the Grand Canal.
This is the predicament of large countries compared to small countries. Europe is like a small boat that can turn around easily, while China has a history of digging canals for thousands of years. Unless you build a train that can significantly improve transportation efficiency compared to the canal, the court officials will not really look at you differently.

Another frustrating aspect of railways for China is that any railway that can play a strategic role often exceeds 1,000 kilometers in length. Even for a large country like China, the cost of such projects is not a small amount.

In contrast, in European countries, building a few hundred kilometers of road can immediately yield benefits, while in China, building a few hundred kilometers is like throwing a stone into a river—completely useless.

So if you want to convince the court officials to allocate one-third or even half of their annual fiscal revenue to railway construction, you have to present them with 'value' and 'benefits' that will truly impress them. You can't sway them with half-baked solutions like planetary locomotives.

After all, this is no small sum of money. Even the prime minister has to be extremely cautious when making a decision. If it doesn't work out in the end, he will at least be infamous for eternity and be written into history.

"In the Annals of the Ming Dynasty, in the Biographies of Treacherous Officials, it is recorded that so-and-so misled the Emperor Taizu, wasting billions and causing immense hardship to the people, building a dilapidated railway that was even less efficient than the Grand Canal. This man truly deserves to die."

Therefore, from the very beginning, Lu Jin never intended to build any kind of four-wheeled planetary locomotive. Of course, he wouldn't even dare to think about the heavy steam locomotives of later generations, those steel behemoths weighing hundreds of tons.

However, in the original history, in 1836, just over a decade after the birth of the planetary locomotive, Americans modified the planetary locomotive to create an American-style locomotive.

This type of train only adds two pairs of guide wheels compared to the planetary type, and slightly lengthens the boiler, from more than three meters to about five meters, and increases the weight from six tons to about ten tons. However, the traction capacity has increased exponentially, and one locomotive can pull a 450-ton train.

The key point is that its modifications were not particularly significant, and the manufacturing technology was not very difficult. After all, the United States had only been independent for a few decades and was still before the Civil War. If it could be manufactured with the meager industrial resources left behind by the British in the colonies, then Lu Jin would have even less of a problem.

Therefore, Lu Jin's plan was to lengthen and enlarge this American-style locomotive by stretching the front of the locomotive to six or seven meters long, increasing the weight to about 12 tons, and expanding the cylinder bore and piston stroke to enable it to achieve a traction force of more than five or six hundred tons.

In this way, it can pull 20 green passenger cars or 20 coal open wagons (each weighing 25 tons) at a time, or it can pull 40 boxcars (used to transport lighter goods such as cotton, cloth, and grain that are susceptible to rain). This would greatly increase transportation efficiency, and Lu Jin was confident that he could use this thing to persuade the civil and military officials.

Even though he was the founding emperor and his immense prestige was enough to make him act arbitrarily, it was still best to have the understanding and support of the officials for a long-term strategy like building railways that was related to the fate of the country. Otherwise, it wouldn't be right for him to always act on his whims and go against the officials.

However, even though each train only has a carrying capacity of five or six hundred tons, which is far less than the heavy-haul trains of later generations that often carry tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of tons, it is still not something that ordinary light steel rails can withstand. At the very least, it must be steel rails weighing more than 30 kilograms per meter.

Moreover, train technology develops very quickly. New technologies emerge every three to five years, and upgrades are needed every twenty years or so. By then, the load-bearing capacity will definitely increase dramatically. In this case, if we stick to the minimum of 30 kg/m rails, the cost may be cheaper now, but it will probably need to be overhauled in a few years. So, for the long term, even if we don't use 50 kg/m rails, we should at least use 40 kg/m rails to ensure that this line can last for at least twenty or thirty years.

After making up his mind, Tao Guangyi immediately began to assemble a route survey team. The emperor's order was an imperial decree. As soon as Lu Jin made the request, Tao Guangyi carried it out. However, he soon encountered problems because even preliminary surveying was not a simple matter.

This is the first time anyone has built a railway, and they have no experience whatsoever. At least Lu Jin has seen railways before, but they haven't even seen one. So how wide should the railway track be? How heavy should the trains be? What should the turning radius be? What is the maximum gradient limit for climbing? What is the safe distance for trains to meet? Without this data, you don't even know how wide the track should be, so how can you survey the route?

So the first step is to get this basic data.

Now that Tao Guangyi and the others have been learning from Lu Jin for so long, they are already familiar with Lu Jin's way of doing things: when in doubt, do an experiment! First, make a scaled-down model and experiment with it, right? However, some of the most basic data were provided by Lu Jin first.

For example, the track gauge, and the length, width, and height dimensions of the carriages, etc.

Regarding the railway track gauge, Lu Jin had long been fed up with the so-called 'standard gauge' of later generations. This thing was just something the British slapped on their foreheads, pointed to the width of two horse rumps and said that the railway should be this wide, which severely limited the railway's carrying capacity. It was outrageous.
If it weren't for the fact that so many railways around the world use the 1435mm gauge in later generations, and that the cost of making changes would be too high, this so-called standard gauge should have been abolished long ago. Now that he has to start from scratch, Lu Jin naturally has to abandon this thing, so he chose the 1.6m gauge.

Some countries still use 1.6-meter gauge rails in later generations, such as Chile, Argentina, India, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, etc. 1.6 meters may seem much wider than 1435, but in reality, it is just that the two rails are each shifted outward by the width of three fingers. The construction cost will not increase much, but the upper limit of transport capacity can be increased by at least 20%.

Putting everything else aside, he had long disliked the five-person-a-row carriage on the train.

He might have a slight case of OCD. He could have easily widened the carriages by just a few seat widths to fit six people side-by-side with an aisle, but he insisted on using the 'standard gauge' with its grooves. Couldn't it have been better to make it symmetrical on both sides? He had to make it a 3+2 layout, five people per row.
Well, that's great. As the saying goes, a blank sheet of paper is the best canvas to paint on. Lu Jin finally turned things around. The 3+3 layout looks much better, and the space feels much more spacious.

In fact, widening the track gauge is not just about adding a row of seats. Lu Jin had heard about some problems that my country's railways had encountered before. Because the standard gauge is too narrow, the carriages have to be made taller and narrower, which in turn raises the center of gravity of the carriages.

Therefore, when the railway travels from the Hexi Corridor through Xingxingxia to Xinjiang, the train will encounter strong crosswinds at Xingxingxia, which can easily overturn the train. If the carriages were wider, flatter, and had a lower center of gravity, the train would definitely be more stable.

Indeed, this is the case. Most countries that adopted the 1.6-meter gauge later did so to reduce the impact of strong winds on trains, such as South Africa, India, Chile, and Argentina. This finally eliminated the future problem.

In addition, the fact that later trains only had five seats per row was not only due to track gauge restrictions, but also related to the width limits set by the state. The width limit of my country's railways is 3.4 meters, and the widest carriage cannot exceed this width. However, in reality, most green trains were not even 3.1 meters wide. It was only in the era of high-speed rail that a width of slightly more than 3.3 meters was achieved, just barely meeting the width limit.

This time, Lu Jin also relaxed the width limit to 3.8 meters, and increased the width of the carriage to about 3.6 meters, leaving some safety margin, so that a row of six seats can be placed.

Moreover, this width limit actually has little impact on the road. Even if a tunnel is dug, it will not increase the construction cost by much. It is mainly related to the curvature radius of the station entrance.

Historically, the standard of 3.4 meters was set due to the constraints imposed by the old railway stations before the founding of the People's Republic of China. After that, people got used to it and were too lazy to change it. But now, Lu Jin is starting all over again. The Ming Dynasty doesn't even have a single railway station yet, and all of them will be newly built in the future, so naturally, those concerns are no longer a concern.

After determining these basic data, Tao Guangyi then found someone to start making models. In accordance with Lu Jin's requirements, the experimental model circuits were built in the palace. After they were built, in addition to conducting experiments, they could also be used as toys for the princes.
The model was made to a 7:1 scale. The tracks were less than a foot wide, but the carriages were half a meter wide enough for an adult to sit in. The specially rolled thin rails were laid directly on the floor of the palace.

In addition, several scaled-down carriage samples were built on the open space to the east of Yunxiang Hall for reference and calculation. Each passenger carriage is 26 meters long, 3.6 meters wide, and 4.2 meters high. There are also shorter open wagons, covered wagons, and other freight wagons. When connected, the five or six carriages together are more than 100 meters long.

Such a massive project eventually caught the attention of the cabinet. While ordinary officials were not authorized to visit Lu Jin in the inner court, cabinet ministers were allowed to do so at any time.

Li Shanchang and Feng Guoyong soon heard the news that Lu Jin was building a house next to Yunxiang Palace. At first, they didn't take it seriously. There wasn't even a foundation yet, and not many craftsmen. So it couldn't be a newly built palace. Maybe it was just some fancy thing His Majesty did on the spur of the moment.

Sure enough, a few days later they received another message. It wasn't a house after all, but they didn't know what it was. It looked like a boat but not quite, and it had a row of windows open. Who knows what it was for?

Upon hearing this, the two exchanged a glance, and Feng Guoyong then said, "Let's go take a look? Since His Majesty has built it in such a conspicuous place, he probably doesn't intend to hide it from us."

“Then let’s go take a look. Sigh,” Li Shanchang said. “The court already has enough to deal with. I just hope His Majesty won’t cause any more trouble. If he has to, it should be delayed for at least two years.”

Upon hearing this, Feng Guoyong replied, "As subjects, how can you and I decide this? Besides, given His Majesty's temperament, once he has made up his mind, we can't stop him even if we want to. Let's go and see first."

"Hmm." Li Shanchang nodded, then casually picked up a few memorials from the table and went to report some work to Lu Jin.

Just moments later, to the surprise of both of them and Lu Jin, the two prime ministers, after learning about the railway's performance and benefits, actually showed a more enthusiastic attitude than Lu Jin, which was truly unexpected.
(End of this chapter)