On April 2, 1791, just when Deng Fei and his team achieved a preliminary victory in Batavia, Beihai Town ushered in an unprecedented event. The first phase of the Boli Town-Heilongjiang City railway line, which had been under construction for more than a year, was about to be officially opened to traffic.

Starting from March 30, as long as travelers from all over Beihai Town have no important matters at hand, they have come to Boli Town one after another to attend the opening ceremony.

On April 1st, Chen Xuan came with the escort of Zhao Xin's half guard battalion, Momo, who was over one year old. She was accompanied by A Miao, Miss Wu, Chen Erya, and even Wang Zhenyi and Tang Xiao who had just recovered from a serious illness.

Chen Xuan also saw this. Although her man didn't show mercy everywhere, he was not much worse than a fickle carrot. What she was most afraid of now was that Zhao Xin would put a blond and blue-eyed Rakshasa woman in Beihai Town one day, which would be even more chaotic by then.

In addition, Wang Zhong, Duan Yucai, Liu Taigong, Hong Liangji, Jiao Xun, Huang Chengji and others also put down their work and followed Yu Deli and Lao You and others. The old boxers Wu Zhong, Chai Rugui, Li Qingwen and others were the ones who served as their escorts.

As for the general public, cough cough, the people are busy with spring plowing and have no time to take the "train". After all, these days, they are guarding fifty acres of land without worrying about food and clothing. The warm kang of wives and children is the pinnacle of life. What are you going to do if you have nothing to do?

The entire line is 208.7 kilometers long. The starting point is Boli Station 24.3 kilometers northwest of Boli Town, and the end point is Chimuni Town, where the intersection of Aktala Mountains and Breya Mountains in the Little Khingan Mountains.

"Qimuni Town" is an emerging village town that started due to railways. It is located in the lowland plain of the Chimuni River, the left tributary of Heilongjiang. This place has no name. Its surrounding hundreds of miles is called "Qimuniwoji" in the official map of the Qing court and the Hezhe people. It belongs to the residence of the Chirshe people.

The forests in Jilin and Heilongjiang in this time and space are lush and covered the sky and the sun. The large swamp area formed by falling leaves accumulated in the forest for many years, resulting in poor water flow. It is called "Wuji" by Hezheren.

During the preliminary survey, Sima Jianghan from the island country and his students found a high-quality coal mine on the left bank of the Chimuni River, 257 kilometers away from the Heilongjiang River. After confirming that it was correct, Lin Ziping and others reported it to the "Beihai Town Railway Construction Committee", and then decided to set up a station here.

Since the survey team only discovered this coal mine on the nearly 600 kilometers of Boli to Hailanpao, the status of Chimuni Town became increasingly important. After all, the trains in Beihai Town need coal, and the steel mills in Boli need a lot of coal.

If Beihai Town wants to fully develop the vast and sparsely populated Outer Northeast and East Siberia, if there is no railway, everything will be out of reach, let alone mobilize troops in time. Only railways can firmly lock tens of millions of square kilometers of land, transport thousands of poor farmers in the pass to various settlements centered on the railway station, and truly incorporate this land into the Chinese territory.

Zhao Xin heard an interesting story when he was in Baibaier City (Irkutsk), which can explain the vast territory of Siberia and the difficulty of traveling. Of course, this may also be fabricated by someone.

It is said that in the mid-18th century, Empress Elizabeth Petrovna of Tsarist Russia invited six virgins from the Kamchatka Peninsula to St. Petersburg to meet. These chaste girls, under the escort of Tsarist Russian officials, were already pregnant with the children of the guards. When these people traveled more than 10,000 kilometers again and arrived in St. Petersburg, the women were already pregnant with the younger brothers and sisters who had first children.

In fact, the Mala Railway has been used in the jurisdiction of Beihai Town for several years, from the gold mine on Solenji Island to the Beiquanzhou coal mine in Hokkien, and then to the Lingjia mine area. The longest one is used in the Beiquanzhou coal mine, which is almost 1.5 kilometers long. Three carriages can pull eight tons of coal at a time. They use Mongolian horses seized from fighting the Qing army before.

Construction of railways from Boli Town to the west is extremely difficult. Although stones made of road slag can be mined from mountains 80 miles away, the areas where the railway passes are all swamps in the frozen land. It is frozen in winter and thawed in spring and becomes a mud pond.

What made the Railway Construction Committee most amused is that although the coniferous forests in Boli area are boundless and have extremely rich wood resources, most of them are not strong enough and have poor durability. If you can make paper, it is impossible to make sleepers. If you cut down undry wood to make sleepers, it will be damaged in less than one or two years. Therefore, the suitable wood has to be transported from the Xingkai Lake North Shore Forest Farm, which is 300 kilometers away.

To cut trees, the roots must be removed. The roadbed must be dug three meters deep underground, then backfilled with gravel and even cement, then the roadbed and cuttings must be built, and drainage canals must be built. At the same time, the roadbed workers must also build a road parallel to the railway line and can accommodate four four-wheeled carriages.

Since June 1789, more than 20,000 island workers organized by the Tokugawa Shogunate, Hokkai, began to be busy on this land. Their main tasks were logging, digging and quarrying.

The entire project is very heavy, but Beihai Town did not treat the food, clothing and housing of farmers and criminals in these island countries. In summer, most workers camped and lived in tents. In winter, since they could only build bridges, build stations and carry out other auxiliary projects, half of the people working. In winter, workers lived in a cellar that could accommodate 10 to 20 people.

From April to September, workers generally work from 6:30 in the morning to 7:30 in the evening, which costs 13 hours a day, and only two hours of rest during lunch time, which is exhausting; even in the cold winter, these people have to work for seven or eight hours a day.

The workers in the island country work six days a week and also rest during holidays in Beihai Town. Although the food is not exquisite, it is okay to be full. The workers' meals are deducted from their salaries. Some of the ingredients come from Beihai Town, while others are fishing and prey purchased from Hezheren. In this year, there are many fish in Hezheren and the surrounding tributaries, like stars in the sky. In the past two years, the Chilhergegens have earned enough to support the family by relying on providing fishing catches to railway construction sites.

Laborers usually have porridge steamed buns with pickled pickles made in Beihai Town. They are also steamed buns for lunch, with occasionally brown rice and river fish stewed in a large iron pot. A pot of wild boar or roe deer meat will be stewed every few days, often with bean sprouts, radish or beet leaves. Dinner is noodles, accompanied by fish soup or broth left over from noon, and each person will get a piece of butter or lard.

Because workers from different villages or towns are responsible for their food, the food level varies greatly. Those who have poor cooking skills often cause complaints and even riots, but generally speaking, they are still well-behaved.

The "Bethai Town Railway Construction Committee" gives workers from these island countries good treatment. For example, the salary of skilled lumberjacks and quarries is 30 yuan per month, while the excavators with no technical content are 10 yuan per month. Even if half of the shogunate and the vassals that provide labor, the proletarian refugees in Kanto will still be snatched away.

At present, if you can come to Beihai Town to build a railway, you have to give the vassal government offices at least ten taels, and you have to pay Beihai to buy ship tickets for ten taels, so the poor farmers can only borrow usury. In the past two years, the shogunate has made a lot of money from top to bottom, greatly alleviating the economic crisis caused by forced reduction of the interest rate on the breakdown.

Since it is a railway construction, there will inevitably be danger. Although the "Railway Construction Committee" and Zhao Xin himself have made every effort to provide various advanced tools and equipment, the construction site conditions are unimaginable.

For example, when constructing in a swamp section, you often have to work in a waist-deep mud. It’s not that there is no water pump, but the more you go down the water, the mud and gravel are mixed together and can only be dug by hand.

During the hotter months, mosquitoes and small bites are the most common threats and the root cause of infectious diseases. Last summer, more than 200 workers from Morioka's Morioka broke out in cholera. Although the medical team in Beihai Town quickly set off from Furdan City after hearing the news, dozens of workers had died by the time of arrival.

The most dangerous project is to build bridges, especially in winter, where workers must work on scaffolding above the river or on surrounding embankments. The so-called safety protection equipment is tied with a rope, and some people even find it troublesome to tie ropes. When they work, their body temperature will unknowingly drop to a point that makes them numb. As a result, once they slip, the frozen fingers cannot grasp any support in time, and those who do not tie ropes will fall.

According to the calculations of the Finance Department of the Railway Construction Committee, basically one worker will die for every 500,000 Beihai silver dollars spent. As for the death rate of tunnel excavation, it is even higher. Due to the death and injury caused by landslides, there must be 3 to 4 people for every 500,000 Beihai yuan.

In fact, the most complicated thing in the entire railway project is the bridge across various tributaries of Heilongjiang. It’s okay to go from Boli to Qimuni Town, but from Heilongjiang City to the east, you need to pass six rivers of different widths, including the Hala River, Kurtur River, Zhuchun River, Kulu River, Sulu River, and Bizhan River.

The steel bridge designs on larger rivers were designed by Zhao Xin after obtaining the surveying and mapping data in another time and space. As the chief engineer, Pereira also made great achievements and learned a lot of advanced bridge engineering techniques from later generations from drawings.

The design requirements are met, and the piers built in the river must be particularly strong to withstand the pressure of the railway in spring. You must know that those winding streams with small water that originally looked small will suddenly turn into fierce torrents after a rain in spring, wrapped in melted snow and floating ice, rushing out of the mountains, with great potential to destroy all obstacles.

After completion, all bridges must be tested for compressive resistance and bending in turn, so that trucks loaded with heavy objects must be allowed to travel to the middle of each bridge for two hours, without any problem at all. It is precisely because of this that the railway from Heilongjiang City to Kubutlin section is expected to be opened to traffic next year as soon as possible.

Although various difficulties encountered in the first railway construction, it also laid the foundation for future railway construction to East Siberia and Shanhaiguan. Zhao Liang believes that starting from next year, the railway from Heilongjiang City to Jaxa can be started.

On the night when Chen Xuan and his party arrived, Zhao Xin carried his hands behind his back and walked out of a small courtyard in the military camp in Boli Town as if he had just inspected the barracks. Outside the yard, Chai Rugui and Li Qingwen had been waiting for a long time with a row of men.

The reason why Zhao Xin chose this time to come back was to avoid causing chaos. But even so, Chai Rugui and the other two thought that it only took three days from sending a telegram to inform him to appear. They were all shocked and did not even dare to breathe, for fear of improper behavior annoyed the god. With the light at the gate of the courtyard, Zhao Xin was quite amused to see Chai Rugui and the others' nervous appearance.

After Chen Xuan and his group arrived at Boli, they were arranged to live in a yard outside the military camp. Because there were so many people at once, the mayor of Boli Town could not arrange too many residences, so Wang Zhenyi, Tang Xiao and others also lived in a place with Chen Xuan.

At this time, several women had just had supper, but did not dissipate after removing the bowls and chopsticks. They all listened attentively to Wang Zhenyi about the incident in the field last year. As for Zhao Xin's son, he spread his calves in the house and ran around. A Miao opened his hands and followed behind with a nervous expression, fearing that the other party would bump into it.

This chapter is not over, please click on the next page to continue reading! A creaking sound in the yard, and the heavy wooden door was opened from the inside. Zhao Xin, who walked in, strode towards the main house without waiting for the guards who opened the door. He rushed for a day, tossing back and forth, and was so hungry that he was already hungry. So when he pushed the door into the house without hesitation, Wang Zhenyi's voice stopped abruptly, and everyone's eyes immediately changed from surprise to surprise. Except for Chen Xuan and A Miao, everyone else quickly stood up and blushed to salute Zhao Xin.

(⊙o⊙), Zhao Xin looked at Yingying Yanyan in the room and thought to himself, "I'll just go, why are you here?"

The next morning, Zhao Xin and his family of three, A Miao and others crossed the Ussuri River by official boat, and then took a carriage to the newly completed Boli Railway Station.

When the carriage passed through the bustling crowds on both sides of the road and passed through a forest, Chen Xuan and A Miao, who were sitting in the carriage, turned their heads and looked out the window, and couldn't help but scream, awakening Zhao Xin, who was dozing off in the car.

Since it is the starting station of the first railway in Beihai Town, Boli's railway station is exquisitely designed by Pereira. The whole building combines Chinese style and Western European Gothic retro style, facing north and south. The entire station not only looks like a huge beige stone castle, but the blue glazed tiles on the roof and Chinese floor-mounted glass windows are also unique. The only thing that has not yet been completed is the five-meter-high bell tower on the east side of the station. Pereira's suggestion is to invite a few watchmakers from Macau, but he can't play with this thing.

At this time, the square in front of the railway station was full of carriages and cars, all of which were the cars of the crossing people who had arrived in advance and other related people. Railway police and North Navy soldiers were everywhere on the open space, separating the high-level officials of Beihai Town from ordinary people.

Zhao Xin took his wife and children and A Miao out of the carriage, picked up his son who was about to jump up, and smiled and greeted Chen Qingsong, Zhao Liang, Yu Deli, Lao You, Wang Zhong and others who came out to greet him, and walked into the station together.

Without saying anything, everyone first went straight to the platform. When they arrived at the heavily guarded platform, several steam train enthusiasts who had traveled through the crowd had gathered there in advance and were commenting in front of the front of the car.

"I have to go up and take a look."

"Okay! Go together."

"Forget it, the cab is not that comfortable, you'll be so hot when burning coal!"

"All six of us are in the cab. Where do you ask the driver and the furnace driver to go? Or you can sit on the coal pile behind and have a breather."

As the few people were talking, they stopped talking when they saw Zhao Xin and the others coming, and they all came to say hello, and by the way they teased the rich second generation of Zhao Dabao's family.
Chapter completed!