Chapter 18: Railway
That’s right. A railway, complete with tracks, that could run trains!
This wasn’t because Li Qingsong was bored and had nothing better to do. There were ample and necessary reasons for it.
The reason was simple. The steel mill could produce about 270 tons of steel per day, which translated to a daily requirement of at least 1,000 tons of iron ore.
And that was just for the steel. The mill also needed a matching power plant.
There was no coal on Ceres, and that stuff, Tolin, couldn’t be used for steelmaking. Therefore, all smelting activities had to be powered by electricity.
This meant it was bound to be a massive consumer of electricity.
According to calculations, for every ton of steel Li Qingsong produced, he would consume about 600 kilowatt-hours of electricity.
At 270 tons per day, that was 162,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity!
Its power consumption could even exceed that of the entire main base at present.
Such a massive amount of power couldn’t be drawn from the existing grid. The load fluctuations would be too great, and the grid would collapse.
A dedicated power plant had to be built to supply it with electricity.
At the current stage, to generate one kilowatt-hour of electricity, Li Qingsong needed to consume 1.2 kilograms of Tolin Mine and 0.5 kilograms of Oxygen Ore, for a total of 1.7 kilograms.
162,000 kilowatt-hours would require about 300 tons of Tolin Mine and Oxygen Ore!
Combined with the iron ore, this meant supplying at least 1,300 tons of materials to the steel mill and power plant on an average day.
If he were to transport this many materials with tractors, even dedicating all his current tractors to the task wouldn’t be enough.
Besides, even if there were enough tractors, they would still need enough drivers to operate them, which was another expense for Li Qingsong.
After thinking it over, Li Qingsong decided to go all in and just build a dedicated railway.
This railway would not only connect to Iron Mine No. 1 but also to several nearby Oxygen Ore deposits. It could even be extended to surrounding Tolin-rich areas, copper mines, and aluminum mines. When the time came, all he would need to do was build a few branch lines to connect them all.
A mass of 1,300 tons was too much for tractors, but for a train, a single train could haul it all away.
And you could run more than just one train on a single railway. With good scheduling, you could have over a dozen trains running simultaneously. At that point, the railway’s transport capacity would be far greater than a mere few thousand tons.
It wouldn’t just be enough to fully satisfy the needs of the current steel mill and power plant. It could even meet the demands of more steel mills, power plants, and even more gold, silver, copper, and aluminum smelters that Li Qingsong might build in the future!
This railway was a must-build.
Li Qingsong had already completed the preliminary survey work.
He had also acquired the necessary knowledge to build a railway by studying the basic principles from the Deep Space Spaceship, which was fully supplemented by the accumulated experience from the Clones’ diligent labor.
Now, everything was ready. All that was left was to build it.
The total length of the railway would be 33 kilometers. It would pass through three hillsides and two ravines, with a total of four stations: the Main Base starting station, the Iron Mine terminus, and two intermediate stations for Oxygen Ore and Tolin.
From now on, Li Qingsong devoted all his main production capacity to manufacturing rails and connectors.
Although the steel mill couldn’t operate at full power yet, its current production capacity was more or less enough to meet the needs of constructing the railway.
Clones fanned out, starting construction simultaneously from several locations to speed up the process.
One team of Clones arrived before a mountain peak that the tracks needed to pass through.
The peak was about 100 meters high, which on Ceres was considered just a small hill.
The Clones first used electric heating equipment to clear the various solidified gases from its surface. Then, they drilled holes, stuffed explosives produced by the chemical plant several meters deep inside, and detonated them directly.
With a faint tremor in the ground, the massive rock cracked apart, and a gap was blasted directly through the peak.
The Clones swarmed forward. Like strongmen, each one of them moved the huge rocks and tossed them elsewhere.
The gravity on Ceres was low anyway, so moving the rocks was convenient.
Larger boulders were handled by several Clones working together. The even bigger ones were taken care of by steam-powered bulldozers that spewed black smoke, forcefully pushing them away.
Li Qingsong didn’t have to worry about where to pile the rubble. Unlike on Earth, he didn’t have to go through the trouble of hauling it to a specific disposal site.
Besides, no one was here to enforce environmental regulations.
Under these circumstances, the work of cutting through mountains and building the road proceeded smoothly and quickly.
While explosives boomed on one side, dozens of Clones gathered before a ravine on the surface of Ceres on the other.
This canyon was over a hundred meters wide. To go around it, the railway would need to be extended by more than ten kilometers.
Li Qingsong didn’t want to deal with that hassle, so he decided to just build a bridge.
Li Qingsong couldn’t build a modern bridge like the ones on Earth, which required rigorous analysis, precise mechanical design, and special high-performance materials.
But that didn’t matter. The gravity on Ceres was low. For an identical bridge, the load-bearing capacity on Ceres would be more than ten times greater out of thin air.
For the same load requirement, the demands on material performance and construction techniques would also be reduced by a factor of more than ten.
It only needed to support a train. For that little weight, casually throwing together a steel frame would be enough.
That’s what Li Qingsong thought, and that’s what he did.
He didn’t even build steel columns from the canyon floor to support the bridge. Instead, he simply anchored some steel frames to the rock walls on both sides, using a mechanical structure similar to an arch bridge to hold it up.
This method was faster and saved more steel. After all, his current steel production capacity wasn’t very high.
As for whether it was strong enough to support the bridge and a train—that was no problem at all.
Even with two fully loaded trains crossing at the same time, plus the bridge’s own weight, the total mass would be 4,000 tons at most. This would translate to a weight of only a few hundred tons. It was a steel structure, after all; there was no way it couldn’t support a few hundred tons.
The track-laying process was even more simple and crude.
Thanks to the surface of Ceres being frozen extremely solid by the low temperatures, Li Qingsong didn’t need to do any roadbed hardening work, aside from some initial leveling.
He simply laid the four rails of the double track on supports, fastened them down, and then secured the rails in pairs every few dozen meters.
This not only saved effort but also steel.
Guardrails were even more unnecessary. There were no people or animals running around on Ceres.
With a construction style guided entirely by practicality, the work on the bridge, tracks, and mountain excavation progressed at lightning speed.
While things were proceeding smoothly here, a significant portion of Li Qingsong’s attention was focused on Machinery Plant No. 1.
There, Li Qingsong was going to build two locomotives.
And they wouldn’t be steam-powered engines, but electrified ones!