It was Jiangnan Province that petitioned for railway construction. They planned to build a railway from the Jiangbei area of Shanghai County, Songjiang Prefecture, to the estuary of the Huangpu River, which is the Suzhou Industrial Zone area where Jiading County, Suzhou Prefecture is located.
The three major industrial zones on the north bank of the Huangpu River are Suzhou Industrial Zone in Haikou, Songjiang First Industrial Zone near Suzhou Industrial Zone in Shanghai, Songjiang Second Industrial Zone and Shanghai Jiangbei Industrial Zone. These five industrial zones are actually The area connected together is generally called Songjiang Industrial Zone by the outside world.
Suzhou Prefecture has strong objections to this general term, because among the five major industrial zones, one of them belongs to Suzhou Prefecture and has nothing to do with Songjiang Prefecture.
But no matter what... This is because most of this large area still belongs to Shanghai County, Songjiang Prefecture, so outsiders spontaneously formed such a name.
Therefore, apart from emphasizing the Suzhou Industrial Zone in official documents and calling this area generally the Jiangnan Industrial Zone, no one in Suzhou paid any attention to them...
These five major industrial zones stretch from the north bank of the Suzhou River in Shanghai County to the west bank of the Huangpu River, stretching for more than 20 kilometers until they reach the estuary of the Huangpu River.
Then it changes to the north in Wusong Fort. There is a large area along the Yangtze River in the north of Wusong Fort... This is also the production base of Jiangnan United Steel Company. There is a Jiangnan United Steel Plant built nearby to provide nearby major machinery. We provide steel raw materials to various industries such as companies and shipbuilding industries.
If we follow the route along the river, the length of the five major industrial zones along the river can reach 30 kilometers!
Within these thirty kilometers, there are countless factories and various offices, large and small.
Most of the country's most famous large companies are either headquartered here or have offices here, and many even have their main production bases here.
Among them, there are hundreds of large factories with more than 1,000 employees.
Jiangnan United Steel Company, Songjiang Naval Shipyard, Luohua Shipyard, Guangzhou Machinery Company's Songjiang production base, Songjiang Iron and Steel Company, Songjiang Machinery Company, Wusong Naval Arsenal, Tianjin Machinery Company's Songjiang production base, Daye Heavy Machinery Company's No. The Second Branch Factory, Wusong Military Food Factory, the new base of Li's Machine Tool Company under Li's Iron Company, the main cloth production base and raw silk production base of Suqin Textile Company, the leading textile company, etc.
There are many large companies that are well-known to Chinese people or key companies directly invested by the Ministry of Industry.
In the entire Pansongjiang Industrial Zone, in addition to these large enterprises, there are actually many more small and medium-sized enterprises that are densely packed. Even the local industrial and commercial department may not be able to figure out how many small and medium-sized enterprises there are.
I'm afraid it's not quite accurate to describe it in terms of quantity. It should be said that everything that can be bought with money in the Dachu Empire can be bought here.
It ranges from an armed merchant ship with iron ribs and wooden hulls of more than 2,000 tons to as small as a screw.
All kinds of large machine tools driven by steam engines, various ultra-high-precision processing equipment, etc. can be found in this place.
And they are often still in stock...
These are all kinds of industrial products, and all kinds of messy ordinary consumer goods, whether they are luxury jewelry imported from overseas, precious furs obtained from the northern ice fields, or anything else, you can basically buy it if you have money.
Here, after more than ten years of sustained and rapid development, it has evolved into a super industrial city compared to this era.
Maybe you can't see any high-rise buildings here...but you can see endless, endless factory buildings and various residential areas where workers live.
As an aside, it is precisely because there are no high-rise buildings these days that the Pan-Jiangnan Industrial Zone is so big. Because without high-rise buildings, the floor area ratio is very low. In addition, factories these days like to move to larger areas. Repaired.
For example, the production base of United Steel Company is more than two thousand meters long, and there is also the production base of Wusong Iron and Steel Company next to it, which is also more than one kilometer long...
These two steel companies alone have actually occupied one-tenth of the riverside area of the entire Pan-Jiangnan Industrial Zone.
And these factories also need a lot of workers, often thousands of workers, and these workers also need places to live and live.
Due to technical and cost problems, these living places have been built several stories high. They are basically one-story bungalows, but it is remarkable that they are made into two stories.
Plus other commercial, educational, transportation and other supporting facilities.
This also leads to the fact that the basic area of the industrial zones established by the Chu Empire these days is very large.
There is no way, we cannot ask for area from the sky, we can only ask for more area by expanding to the surrounding areas.
There are countless factories in the entire Pan-Jiangnan Industrial Zone, and the population in it is also extremely large, with a total of one million people. It is the most densely populated area in the Chu Empire, not one of them...
Even the capital, Jinling City, has to surrender... because there are no large factories in Jinling City, especially heavy industry factories. Luo Zhixue still cares about his living environment and has no intention of turning Jinling City into an industrial base. .
Jinling City is a political, financial, and cultural center, and this is enough. There is no need to add an additional industrial center.
Broadly speaking, in fact, the Dangtu Industrial Zone not far away is the industrial center of Jinling City. After all, it belongs to Yingtian Mansion.
The Pan-Jiangnan Industrial Zone has such a large population, and all of them are paid administrative, technical, workers, tertiary industry employees and their families.
This also means that they have the need to purchase many goods.
Therefore, this place is also the consumer goods market with the strongest per capita consumption power and the largest total consumption in the Chu Empire!
Well, this is also the largest market for industrial products in the empire!
Whether it is terminal consumer goods or steam engines used in various corporate factories, if you can seize this market, it means that you have truly gained a foothold.
And if you want to truly become a top-ranking product in the empire and surpass your competitors, the market in the Pan-Songjiang region is even more indispensable.
Pan Songjiang's market is so important that there is a saying in the imperial industrial and commercial circles: Whoever wins Songjiang wins the world!
For such a large industrial city, its demand for cargo transportation and personnel transportation is also huge!
In the past, ground transportation in this area mainly relied on ordinary freight carriages and river transportation on the Huangpu River.
The river transportation on the Huangpu River is also very limited. After all, it can only be transported along the river. After landing, it has to be transported by horse-drawn carriage.
Although there are many horse-drawn carriages, the cost is also high.
Under such circumstances, Jiangnan Province is thinking of building a commercial railway to facilitate the transportation of goods and personnel between various industrial zones.
However, because this kind of thing is relatively big, it does not mean that it costs a lot of money. After all, the railway here is only twenty or thirty kilometers long at most, and the construction cost of one million yuan is almost enough. But because this is the first day of commercial railway, There is no precedent in the past, and it is impossible for the Chu Empire officials to provide this kind of public transportation to private individuals, so the government must come forward.
In order to avoid potential political risks, the local government could not foolishly just do it on its own. Instead, it adopted the method of reporting first.
In this way, there is a report on a commercial railway that Luo Zhixue saw.
Naturally, Luo Zhixue would not stop this, but readily approved it.
The construction of commercial railways is a major trend in the future, and the construction of commercial railways cannot be the same as those in mining areas. Mining companies must do it on their own, and there must be a unified organization to handle it.
After all, railways are basic livelihood facilities and cannot be left to the private sector.
After giving the approval, Luo Zhixue thought for a while, added a few more comments, and directly asked the Ministry of Transportation to organize manpower and set up a special railway construction, operation, and management agency to coordinate and manage many railway matters.
As for the construction of railways by local governments, Luo Zhixue vetoed it from the beginning and directly asked the Ministry of Transportation to do it.
According to Luo Zhixue's instructions, the Ministry of Transportation transferred a number of personnel from the Official Railways Department and established a Railway Management Office to formulate various railway rules and regulations, establish various standards, and guide the construction of private railways by mining companies. , at least the railway types and gauges must be unified...
There are many kinds of railways in the mining areas in the Da Chu Empire, and there are even several types of rails. In fact, the latest I-shaped rails are not used much. As for the gauge, there are even more. According to their own needs, mining companies build railway tracks with gauges as small as fifty centimeters and as large as one meter six.
The Railway Management Office requires that the gauge of newly built commercial railways in the future be the standard one and a half meters... As for why it is this gauge, there are no special requirements, it is because the carriages of the Da Chu Empire also have this gauge.
Various official roads, various packaging and transportation dimensions, hoisting equipment, etc. used by carriages, as well as the design dimensions of many goods, are basically designed based on the wheel rail size of the carriage.
It is easy to change the track gauge, but if it involves the whole body, the dimensions of many things will have to be changed, so it is better not to change it.
Of course, this is only limited to commercial railways. As for some private mining railways, other companies can do whatever they want. After all, you can't allow a mining company to build railways in mountainous areas with high costs and average transportation volume. The company must build the railway in the mining area according to your one-meter-five-meter standard. The extra cost can easily be hundreds of thousands of dollars. Are you going to pay for it?
However, for convenience, the Railway Management Office has formulated several mining railway standards, namely 75 centimeters, 100 centimeters, 120 centimeters and 1.5 meters.
If you want to directly connect to commercial railways conveniently in the future, and if the terrain is flat and the transportation volume is large, you can build a standard one-meter-five gauge.
If it is a mountainous terrain, in order to save costs, you can change the track later, or simply transport it directly to the mining area railway for dock and river transportation. You can also build a 75-centimeter railway. Anyway, if you build the railway in your own mine, no one will care about you. .
At the same time, a number of standards were finalized, such as the use of I-beam wrought iron rails, standard dimensions of carriages, etc.
Finally, the Railway Management Office announced that a commercial railway will be built in Songjiang Prefecture and Suzhou Prefecture, which will be operated by horse-drawn carriages and will carry both freight and passengers.
This day is the 27th of April in the 21st year of Chengshun. This is also the starting point of the commercial railway operation of the Dachu Empire.
Even if it is just a railway operating using horse-drawn carriages, it still has great historical significance.
Jiangnan Province in the south has built a commercial railway, but the northern region, especially the northern grassland railway that the army is thinking about, is naturally far away...
But the war would have to be fought without railroads.
The Dachu Empire had been preparing for the northern campaign for more than two years, but it would not stop fighting just because there was no railway. Besides, when the empire was preparing its northern strategy, it had never considered railways.
As the empire's strategic preparations in the north were gradually completed, troops were deployed, and a large amount of supplies were reserved in advance. Even the Kuhl City Arsenal completed emergency construction and started small-scale production.
The large-scale military operation of the Chu Empire in the northern region finally kicked off on May 13, the 21st year of Chengshun.
On this day, the commander of the Third Army officially ordered a full-scale counterattack to launch a devastating blow to all Russian colonial strongholds east of Lake Baiga.
The core strategic target is Yakutsk in the middle reaches of the Lena River!
This was also the strategic location that the Chu Empire wanted to seize when it first launched a large-scale war in the north many years ago. Unfortunately, the long distance and the severe cold in the north caused supply interruptions, and they were eventually forced to withdraw.
The withdrawal of troops that year was also a rare battle in which the Chu Empire failed to achieve its strategic goals in its internal and external wars over the years.
It's not that the enemy is too tough, but that the environment and climate of the Arctic ice field are too abnormal!
When fighting in such a poor place, guns, the courage of the soldiers, etc. are secondary. What is really important is the logistics and supply capabilities, in other words, the transportation capabilities.
This is true for the Chu army, and it is also true for the Russians.
The artillery shells cannot be transported. No matter how many artillery pieces you have on the front line, they are of no use.
No, the transportation capacity is not good, and your artillery cannot be transported...
This time, in order to seize the city of Yakutsk, the Chu army spent a lot of money and spent two years building a large number of river boats locally.
There are not only a large number of inland river warships, but also a large number of inland river transport ships.
Because fighting in the north requires reliance on river transportation, although carriages and the like are also important, ships are more important.
In order to support ground operations, the Navy's Little North Sea Fleet has continued to expand in the past two years, making the Little North Sea Fleet the largest river fleet in the navy.
However, the ships in this small North Sea Fleet are mainly divided into two parts. One part is on Lake Baikal and the Angara River, and is mainly used for operations in the Yenisey River Basin.
Another part is hundreds of miles north of Lake Baikal, with North River City on the upper reaches of the Lena River as the main base, used for operations in the Lena River Basin.
And because the Small North Sea Fleet seems to be a whole, but in fact there is no way to gather together to support each other in operations. They all operate separately, and the ships they use are all manufactured locally.
It is very important for the navy's small North Sea Fleet to control the river transportation in these two river basins and ensure the army's logistical supply lines and marching safety.
It is now rare for the navy to be able to shine in the battles in the inland northern region, so it is very careful and has transferred a large number of experienced inland river warfare officers and soldiers.
Under the cover of the navy, more than 8,000 Lena River dispatch troops, stationed in Beihe City and assembled specifically to conquer Yakutsk City, officially attacked Yakutsk City.
Although there are only more than 8,000 troops... this force is already considered a large army in this desolate northern ice field. In order to gather more than 8,000 troops here and maintain their follow-up operations, the Dachu Empire spent a lot of money. The boss is so excited.
After all, this is not just more than 8,000 people, but also dozens of artillery and various weapons and ammunition.
At the same time, this dispatched army also had a cavalry force of more than a thousand people.
These personnel, mules and horses, artillery, as well as numerous grain, grass, ammunition and other combat supplies are not so easy to maintain.
Just to keep this force moving north smoothly, the Second Group of the Little North Sea Fleet, the group responsible for operations in the Lena River Basin, has more than 40 river warships and hundreds of various transport ships to provide fire cover. There are so many ships.
Then a huge fleet was formed and went down the river, heading straight for the city of Yakutsk.
In addition to mobilizing eight thousand troops in this strategic direction, the Chu army also dispatched many troops in other places in the Lena River Basin, especially in the inland hinterland to the east.
These troops ranged from four to five hundred to more than two to three thousand. Those who took the water route were mainly infantry and artillery, while those who took the land route were mainly cavalry.
In the entire Lena River Basin and the area east of it, the Third Army dispatched a total of more than 30,000 people to attack various predetermined targets.
For a time, a full-scale war broke out between the Chu Empire and Russia in Far East Siberia, which was not so cold in summer.
The Chu army consisted of more than 30,000 regular troops, relying on intensive gunfire and strong cavalry, as well as the support of numerous logistics and transportation personnel in the rear.
Attacks were launched against numerous colonial forts held by the Russians.
The Russians relied on their colonial mercenaries, mainly Cossack mercenaries, plus soldiers recruited from local indigenous people, and some immigrant militias to resist.
The core area of the war is naturally the city of Yakutsk.
The Chu army dispatched more than 8,000 ground combat troops to the Lena River. With the support of thousands of naval personnel, they marched all the way down the river and finally successfully arrived at the city of Yakutsk on June 24.
On the way, they also captured three Russian colonial strongholds along the Lena River, which was considered an appetizer.
However, both sides know that the key to this battle lies not in anything else, but in the victory or defeat of the battle of Yakutsk City.
To be precise, it is the victory or defeat before winter comes!
If the Chu army can successfully capture the city of Yakutsk before winter comes, it can basically be declared that the Russian control of the Lena River Basin and the east area has been completely shattered, and the remaining remaining troops will not be a concern.
If the city of Yakutsk cannot be captured before winter arrives, then the Chu army will have no choice but to take the initiative to retreat and return to Beihe City like last time, thereby declaring the failure of the entire northern strategy!
(End of chapter)
