Chapter 1729 Rich people like to live in the countryside
The Navy of the Tang Dynasty is not on the same level as the navies of other countries. If you have to use numbers to measure it, it may be a hundred times or even a thousand times or ten thousand times.
Why?
The two are not on the same level at all, and there is no comparison at all!
Datang randomly sent out any battleship.
Even if they were beaten without fighting back, those indigenous sail warships would not be able to do anything with these tens of thousands of tons.
So what the Tang Dynasty Navy is pursuing now is not some quantitative change or advantage over the indigenous navy, but absolute control!
To use the slogan within the navy, the enemy of the navy has never been the indigenous navy, but the army's bumpkin!
The navy is so powerful, so maritime transportation is naturally also very powerful. There are no problems with coastal transportation.
Therefore, in many coastal areas, there is no need to build a railway at all. It is simple and cheap to directly use ships for transportation.
However, several provinces in the southwest do not have coastal areas. Even Guangxi actually does not have a coastal area, because Lianzhou is under the jurisdiction of Guangdong these days.
The railway company is planning to build a southwest railway starting from Changsha, then arriving in Guiyang, and continuing westward to Kunming.
At the same time, we are also preparing to build a Sichuan-Hankou Railway, which basically goes west from Hankou, then from Yizhang to Badong, and then to Chongqing, Chengdu, etc.
In order to build the Southwest Railway and the Sichuan-Hankou Railway, Datang Railway Corporation has actually spent many years conducting on-site surveys. This route selection has been carefully considered. It is not that after Lin Xuan proposed it and asked them to come up with a plan,
This was done temporarily.
Datang Imperial Railway Corporation has been conducting various surveys across the country for more than ten years, including various railway line surveys.
Since the Railway Corporation has already come up with a plan, Li Xuan will naturally not delay.
With just one stroke of a pen, the construction work of the Southwest Railway and the Sichuan-Hankou Railway was approved.
This also announces that the Datang Imperial Railway Corporation will officially launch these two main line railways, which are extremely difficult to construct.
Let the construction of Datang Railway enter a new stage.
In the past ten years or so, Datang's railway construction has actually been extremely fast. However, due to the technical conditions of this era, and the construction of railways in China, it is impossible to build ports and wharves in overseas territories with other infrastructure companies.
Like other facilities that use a large number of indigenous labor, they can only use imperial subjects.
Therefore, it is impossible not to consider the lives of construction workers and to sacrifice human lives for the sake of progress.
In recent years, in order to speed up the construction of some strategic railways, especially those in Central Asia, even the military has mobilized many active duty units to help build railways. Several of the second and third line troops are now almost
They have become a professional railway construction team, building railways quickly and well.
Due to limitations of technology and personnel, in the past ten years or so, the empire's railway construction, except for a few war-prepared railways, namely the Northwest, Central Asian Railway, Grassland Railway, and Northeastern Railway, most of the other railway line construction followed
The path to commercial construction.
Build railways in places where it is easy to build them, and also consider the profitability prospects of the railways.
The same is true even for the Sichuan-Hankou Railway. After the railway surveyors conducted a route survey, they found that the railway company actually had multiple railway line plans for entering Sichuan. But in the end, why did they choose the plan to go west from Hankou and then enter Sichuan?
It is a version that takes into account that if it is built in this way, the places along the way will be connected to places with larger populations, better economies or potential for development. It is also a comprehensive consideration that takes into account the cost of construction.
As is the case with the Sichuan-Hankou Railway, the construction of railways in other places naturally takes more economic factors into consideration.
Why is the Railway Corporation so keen on building railways in the Pearl River Delta, North China Plain, Yangtze River Delta and Central Plains regions? In addition to various main lines, there are many densely packed branch lines.
In some areas, various railway branch lines can even connect to the county level, making railways the main means of transportation in the area.
This is more obvious in Guangdong.
When Chen Lifu was in charge of Guangdong, he vigorously developed transportation. He dredged various rivers in the Pearl River Basin, but more importantly, he presided over the construction of railways. During his tenure, the Guangdong-Jiangxi Railway and the Guangdong-Han Railway were successively started and completed.
Later, he supported the construction of many branch lines in Guangdong Province. In the densely populated and economically prosperous Pearl River Delta region, it was even possible to connect counties with railways. In some areas, even towns on the outskirts of the city were connected by railways.
At that time, Chen Lifu basically built railways directly as highways.
Therefore, a very dense railway network has also emerged in the Pearl River Delta. This railway network is different from the long-distance railway lines in the traditional sense. On the contrary, most of them are short-distance single-track railways. At the same time, they are also different from the urban rail lines of later generations.
A transportation system is not a concept.
Although the vehicles operating on these railways are short-distance vehicles with relatively few carriages, they have fixed departures every day and travel to and from various parts of the city every day.
Even in some urban centers where land is expensive, Guangzhou has begun to consider simply digging tunnels and building railways, considering the huge cost of land acquisition.
These dense short-distance railway lines can be said to be light rail/subway in later generations, or they can be collectively called urban rail transit.
However, in contemporary Datang, these railway networks are not actually urban rail transit, because although these railway networks are centered on connecting cities, they actually more connect Guangzhou Fucheng urban area to surrounding counties and towns.
It is a short-distance round-trip railway network from the city center to the suburbs.
If I had to give it a definition, it would be more descriptive to say it is ‘suburban railway’.
This is not only true in the Pearl River Delta, but also in other places, especially Shanghai and other surrounding areas in the Yangtze River Delta. This situation even occurs in Tianjin, but the scale is not as large as in Guangzhou.
This led to the emergence of a large number of suburban railways. Except when Chen Lifu took charge of Guangdong at the beginning, he regarded these short-distance suburban railways as substitutes for suburban horse-drawn carriages. At the same time, it was also to expand the urban circle, reduce the cost of transporting goods and people, and provide better transportation.
In addition to developing the local economy.
There is another important factor that cannot be ignored.
That is people’s subjective needs!
What needs?
These days, people who have a little bit of money and status like to live in rural areas...
A more accurate description would be:
The rich and powerful like to live in large estates in the countryside!
The middle and upper classes live in wealthy areas on the outskirts of the city!
With so many people living in the suburbs, it is natural that public transportation is needed to travel between the suburbs and the city every day.