African Entrepreneurship Record

Chapter 373: Chapter 52 First Railway Overall Concept

K is the initial of Constantine’s name, and 001 doesn’t have any special meaning, it simply means ”first,” and the first train is named the ”Constantine.” Subsequent steam locomotives imported to East Africa will not be given names unless in special cases; they will uniformly use numbers starting with K, like the K-002 locomotive currently being shipped to Dar es Salaam.

Looking at the rudimentary conditions of the Dar es Salaam train station, Constantine instructed the Dar es Salaam municipal government: ”As an excellent port, Dar es Salaam handles about 35% of East Africa’s import and export trade. As the times develop, railway construction is an inevitable trend, and expanding the capacity of the First Railway in the future is also imperative. At the very least, essential buildings like warehouses should be constructed to solve the problem of goods storage. Also, a road from the urban area to the train station can be constructed. The existence of the new port should not isolate the connection from the old port to the railway. An additional security checkpoint can be added when leaving the city to inspect suspicious persons or goods.”

Currently, the newly operational First Railway cannot facilitate connectivity from inland East Africa to the coast, but this is only because the First Railway has only completed its initial plan. Ernst considered the future development of the First Railway early on during its design phase.

That is to learn from the design of the Tanzania-Zambia Railway from the previous life and, on this basis, extend the First Railway from Dar es Salaam to the Zimbabwe region.

The most challenging project among them is crossing the Zambezi River, as it requires building a sturdy bridge across the river, and the rivers encountered in the areas the First Railway passes through are not limited to the Zambezi River.

In the previous life, the Tanzania-Zambia Railway involved the construction of 320 bridges, the excavation of 26 tunnels, crossing two countries, costing more than 9 billion and taking nearly 8 years. In the end, nearly 70 people from the Far East paid with their lives. One can imagine how much manpower and resources such a railway consumed at the time.

If East Africa were to build this railway, the difficulty would be no less, because including the Zimbabwe segment, the total length of the railway would exceed two thousand kilometers, several hundred kilometers more than the Tanzania-Zambia Railway, and the difficulty of crossing the Zambezi River would increase dramatically.

However, the Kingdom of East Africa has significant advantages in building the First Railway compared to the previous Tanzania and Zambia, one of which is land. The Kingdom of East Africa does not face difficulties in requisitioning land. Although Africa was very underdeveloped in the previous life, the land privatization issue was well learned, and various tribes greatly delayed the construction period of the Tanzania-Zambia Railway.

Secondly, the Kingdom of East Africa does not have to worry about casualties when building the First Railway. For the East African government, casualties are just numbers, whether in single digits or five digits. And numerous projects in history have proven that as long as you’re willing to sacrifice lives, there is nothing that cannot be accomplished.

Lastly, and most importantly, the Kingdom of East Africa is an agricultural powerhouse and a grain-exporting giant, which is an advantage that the vast majority of African countries in the previous life cannot match.

It is well known that East Africa has the best agricultural conditions in Africa, but countries like Tanzania in the previous life only barely achieved self-sufficiency in grain. Building railroads consumes a large amount of labor, which would reduce the agricultural workforce, but when Tanzania was building railroads, its agricultural production efficiency couldn’t improve out of nowhere, putting more pressure on grain supply.

In the previous life, when Tsarist Russia built the Siberian Railway, the maximum number of workers was close to ninety thousand. The difficulty of building the Siberian Railway was far greater than the First Railway. The long Russian winter alone destined the Siberian Railway to be one of the world’s toughest railways to build. Meanwhile, East Africa can ensure year-round construction, and the number of workers depends entirely on the East African government’s mood, having grains in hand and without worry.

At the same time, the First Railway is not long. Even if the Transvaal Republic is resolved later, extending the First Railway into Transvaal territory, its length would only reach about a third of the Siberian Railway.

Moreover, the construction environment for the First Railway is better than that for the Siberian Railway. The Siberian Railway passes through permafrost routes, corresponding to swampy sections in East Africa. Dealing with swamps is much easier than permafrost.

In fact, comparing the First Railway with the Siberian Railway is a bit too much; the First Railway isn’t even worthy of tying the shoes of the Siberian Railway. It should be compared with the Canadian Pacific Railway of the same period.

Canada became an independent country in 1867, and in 1871 the British Columbia province on the West Coast was lured to join the federation with the promise of building a transcontinental railway within 10 years to connect it to Eastern Canada.

Building railways in Canada followed the same pattern as the Americans, which was to be fast, efficient, and economical. Hence, Chinese laborers became the first choice, accounting for about 4-6% of the total labor force (historically, it was 5-9%).

This follows the same pattern as in Northern Myanmar. Although East Africa secretly spread tales in the Far East about the experiences of Chinese laborers in America, the Canadians remained thick-skinned. They hired some Far Eastern businessmen to set up labor agency offices in the province of Colombia, specializing in recruiting Far Eastern compatriots to be railroad workers (historical fact), describing it convincingly, and specifically looking for acquaintances. After all, everyone is a relative, how could they deceive you! So the success rate was quite high.

However, these are things for the future. Currently, both the Canadian Pacific Railway and East Africa’s First Railway remain on paper, with East Africa leading slightly as the section from First Town to Dar es Salaam is already completed.

The initial idea for the First Railway was to replicate the Tanzania-Zambia Railway, but after occupying Zimbabwe, the plan expanded. If the war with the Boers goes smoothly, the South African section will also be added, eventually reaching around three thousand kilometers, which is more than a thousand kilometers shorter than the Canadian Pacific Railway.

The Canadian Pacific Railway had to cross the Rocky Mountains, but the eastern terrain is mainly plains, so the difficulty is comparable to the First Railway. The main issues faced are similar to Russia’s, with long winters.

East Africa and Canada share the same characteristic of vast land with sparse population, but East Africa has a large indigenous African population, saving East Africa a lot of effort by not having to recruit from the Far East, India, or Italy.

Moreover, without counting the Black population, East Africa has a larger population than Canada, although Canada’s population is more concentrated, mainly distributed in what was the southern part of Canada in the previous life (at this time, the northern part of Canada was still a no-man’s land).

At the same time, the domestic economic total of the Kingdom of East Africa is higher than that of Canada, and this is without considering the wealth of the Heixinggen consortium. The Kingdom of East Africa has achieved this by itself.

Initially, East Africa had better agricultural conditions than Canada, with especially strong tropical cash crop exports, almost monopolizing over 40% of the German region and over 20% of Eastern Europe, and it is still expanding its advantages. Excluding this, its grain exports far exceed Canada’s, and the difference in mineral resource exports is negligible as East Africa internally consumes a large part.

This means that East Africa’s overall economic level far surpasses Canada’s. Without relying on the Heixinggen consortium for support, East Africa itself already has the economic capacity to build railroads, but it must use East African resources and industries as collateral to borrow from financial institutions, which is the basic procedure for railway construction in all contemporary countries.

As the ruler of the Kingdom of East Africa, the Heixinggen royal family, considering national security, certainly does not want foreign (excluding Austria) capital to enter and can fully digest it themselves. Therefore, the initial funding for the First Railway construction is loaned by the Heixinggen Bank to the East African government, and the economic benefits brought by the First Railway in the future are used to repay the debt, essentially transferring it from one hand to the other without any spillage.