Chapter 221: The Little Crossroads Plan (Part 2)

The Executive Committee’s decision was to focus the east-west road construction on the Gaoshanling area to the east, also known as the Piye mountain area. The first step was to build a road from the county town to Damei Village. In the planning, the Piye mountain area was designated as the future main breeding base for the Crossing Group, taking advantage of the relatively cool mountain climate to open up pastures for raising horses, goats, cattle, donkeys, and mules. At the same time, they would cultivate mountain cash crops.

Simultaneously, key projects like the “Grand Library” and various research facilities would be built in the core area of the Piye Mountains, where the Crossing Group’s various materials and books would be stored.

As for the area west of the Wenlan River, apart from the plains along the river, the most valuable area was Ma’niao. As a salt production area, a port for salt export, and a future salt chemical base, the road from Bopu to Ma’niao seemed more important. However, the salt from the Ma’niao Peninsula was currently transported by sea, which offered large volume and low cost. Therefore, Shan Daoqian believed there was no immediate need to open this road.

“However, if we were to open it, we could do something that kills two birds with one stone,” Shan Daoqian reported to the Executive Committee. “It might also be beneficial to Xiong Buyou’s work.”

Shan Daoqian’s idea was simple: repair the post road—the official road.

Lingao’s official roads basically ran along the coast. One route started from the east gate of the county town, passed through Guanrongpu, Chaoyangpu, Changchuanpu, and Jiasuipu, and then entered Chengmai County, leading to the prefectural city. Another route started from the west gate, passed through Xinxingpu, Huaiyinpu, and Luoxianpu, and led to Danzhou.

These two were the main east-west trunk roads of Lingao, but they were rarely used. This was especially true for the road to Danzhou; there was little trade between Lingao and Danzhou during the Ming dynasty. The only major transport of goods was the official grain subsidy from Lingao to the Danzhou garrison, which involved transporting over two thousand shi of grain from the autumn tax quota to Danzhou each year. For safety, this was always done by land. The road to the prefectural city was more frequently traveled, but the road conditions were poor, so most people still preferred to travel by sea.

Shan Daoqian had personally surveyed these two official roads. Their condition was very poor, at the level of an unclassified road at best. The narrowest part was only two meters wide, and the widest was less than four meters. It was just a simple dirt road. Not only did it lack drainage, roadbeds, and other facilities, but in some places, it was a trench-like road sunken into the ground, on average one meter below the surface, and in some places as deep as four meters. When it rained, the road became a small river. If not for the local guide, Shan Daoqian would have been unable to distinguish the traces of the official road in many sections.

Shan Daoqian was not surprised by this. He had learned a little about the history of Chinese roads and transportation when he studied road construction and knew that ancient roads often had such sunken roadbeds, a phenomenon described as “a long-used road becomes a river.” These dirt roads had no foundation or drainage, and over time, they naturally turned into “road ditches.”

Even in the Ming dynasty, this road was very old, having been built during the Shaoxing era of the Song dynasty. Since then, it had only been patched up, with no substantial changes—no wonder some said that life in ancient times changed extremely slowly.

As for the environment along the road, it could be described as desolate. The first few stops after leaving the west gate of the county were in areas with more villages and a denser population. But after passing Jiasuipu, the last ten or so li of the road to Chengmai were complete wilderness, with very few signs of human habitation or fields. However, the bridges along the road were still maintained, and the post stations were staffed by impoverished post soldiers who subsisted on a meager amount of money and grain, responsible for transmitting documents, maintaining supplies for passing officials, and road maintenance.

“Repairing the official road would certainly please Wu Mingjin, but it doesn’t offer much benefit to us,” Wen Desi said, looking at the route map. “There are no areas worth developing along the route.”

“It would facilitate travel for the villages along the way and attract them to the East Gate Market. It could also attract people from the neighboring counties of Chengmai and Danzhou to Lingao.”

“But that would involve the post stations along the way. This needs to be negotiated with the county yamen,” Wen Desi said, looking at the map. “I don’t think we need to repair the whole thing, just a part of it—from the west gate of the county to Chaoyangpu.” Chaoyangpu, on the modern map of Lingao, belonged to Bobei Town and was very close to Ma’niao. Once this section of the road was repaired, it could be used for the future road to Ma’niao.

“Wu Mingjin would definitely be happy about it. The quality of the county’s post road transportation is also a basis for his performance evaluation.”

“As for the other sections of the road,” said Xi Yazhou, who was responsible for assessing the military significance of the road project, “I think it’s better if the road conditions are poor. If we repair it too well, it would be too easy for the Ming army to attack us by land.”

The task of the Transportation Bureau, led by Shan Daoqian, was to pave all the existing roads. He immediately encountered a problem: a shortage of paving materials.

The paving materials used by the Crossing Group for road construction were mainly coal slag and steel slag. Recently, after steel slag was discovered to be usable as a phosphate fertilizer, it was taken over by the agricultural department. Shan Daoqian was left with only coal slag. In fact, even with the addition of steel slag, it was just a drop in the bucket for this massive project.

Not only were the paving materials insufficient, but the roads already paved with coal slag were also showing problems with their low pressure resistance. The heavy-laden ox-carts with their hardwood wheels caused significant damage to the road surface.

“We need to use crushed stone to build the roadbed. A simple compacted earth roadbed like this will only deteriorate faster as traffic increases.”

“There must be maintenance. I want to set up a maintenance team, divided by road sections. A road that is only used and not repaired will inevitably be damaged, no matter how it’s built,” Shan Daoqian said to Mei Lin of the construction company after inspecting the potholed road.

“A crushed stone road? You might as well say an asphalt road,” Mei Lin said dismissively. A crushed stone road was certainly better than a dirt road with a layer of coal slag, but where would they find so much crushed stone?

They had plenty of stone. Since the opening of Nanbao town, the Crossing Group’s general construction stone supply mainly came from the Nanbao area. The original quarry at Bairen Beach was now mainly used for producing high-grade building stone. The Nanbao Mining Office primarily used blasting to extract stone on a large scale, but filling the roadbed required gravel. The stone had to be processed and crushed.

“Do you know how much gravel is needed to pave all these roads?” Mei Lin said to Shan Daoqian. “If we rely on the current method of sending women to break stones, it will take until the year of the monkey and the month of the horse to pave all the roads.”

“Of course, we can’t continue with manual labor. Mass movements can save the day for a while, but not forever. I was thinking of asking the ore dressing plant for help,” Shan Daoqian said, sitting down on a milestone. “The ore dressing plant has two crushers. They are more than capable of crushing stones.”

“Those machines are very busy right now. The cement plant, the fuel plant, the ceramics plant all need them… They are crushing day and night. I’m afraid there won’t be time to handle the road stone—and the iron ore hasn’t even arrived yet. It will be even worse when we have iron ore.”

“It would be best to have our own machine,” Shan Daoqian thought for a moment. “How about applying to the Planning Committee and having the mechanical factory build one themselves? We could put it at the quarry in Nanbao and process the gravel directly before shipping it out.”

“I think that’s a long shot. Have you ever seen a crusher?”

“It’s a very simple machine. We can just build the simplest single-toggle jaw crusher. What’s so difficult about that?”

This type of jaw crusher’s main components were an eccentric wheel driving a set of connecting rods, which then pushed a movable jaw plate to crush the stone. The structure was so simple that even a primary school student could understand it. It was also very reliable in operation, requiring almost no maintenance. Although it was invented in 1858, it was used in the cement, ceramics, mining, and metallurgical industries until the latter half of the 20th century.

“It’s a steel tiger with a mouth full of steel teeth. It consumes a lot of material.”

Although this type of crusher had many advantages, it was large, heavy, and crude, basically a pile of steel. A single movable jaw plate required more than a ton of steel. Whether this major consumer of steel could get a manufacturing permit from the Planning Committee was highly questionable.

Unexpectedly, Ma Qianzhu approved it readily. With the increasing number of infrastructure projects, the demand for building materials such as cement, lime, and gravel was growing daily. The Nanbao Mining Office had also mentioned to the Planning Committee that it would be best to build an ore dressing plant locally to sort and crush the various ores on-site, in order to save transportation capacity.

Not only did Ma Qianzhu approve the crusher, but he also added a request—once the first one was successfully manufactured, three more were to be built. All four machines would be used at the Nanbao Ore Dressing Plant. In addition, a Mozi Type-1 steam engine would be allocated to power the equipment.

The mechanical factory, which had just finished equipping its forging workshop, was instantly energized upon hearing about such a large project. Most people in the mechanical field have a kind of “gigantism,” where bigger is always better. When talking about behemoths like hydraulic presses and forging machines, they spoke as if they were describing a certain AV actress with a pretty face, a great body, and a seductive voice.

The main component of the crusher was the jaw plate, which could be made of low-carbon steel. Through the manufacturing of cannons, steam engine cylinders, and other large equipment, the metallurgical department had gained considerable experience in casting large components. Several apprentices trained by Xiao Bailang could already help make molds for large castings. This jaw plate weighed about 1 ton, far from the heaviest casting they had ever made.

Soon, the foundry cast the required steel ingot. This one-ton steel ingot was loaded onto a sixteen-wheeled heavy-duty railcar and hauled from the foundry to the forging workshop of the mechanical factory.

At this point, the jaw plate ingot was still in its as-cast state, with large columnar crystals and a loose center. Its mechanical strength was limited. Therefore, it had to undergo significant plastic deformation through forging and heat treatment to break the columnar crystals into fine grains and compact the loose structure, in order to obtain excellent metallic structure and mechanical properties.