"Our country's railway system has many components, and the departments and enterprises are quite complex, including large state-owned railway companies, self-built railways by mining area companies, urban railways, regional railways, other types of enterprise-specific railways, agricultural area-specific railways, etc."
"The summary feature is that there are many large and small railways, difficult management, difficulty in connecting railways to the grid, and many other reasons. The national trunk railway network is okay. It is mainly small railways, straight railways, etc. and the trunk railways are not closely connected."
"Among them, mining area railways are the most typical, and their railway construction is limited by resource distribution, especially in the south and central regions."
"The national trunk railway is the main artery of East African Railway Network, while branch lines and other types of railways are capillaries. The primary problem facing East Africa now is that the connection between capillaries and main arteries is not smooth, which leads to low efficiency in blood, that is, logistics and passenger flow dispatching in economic development."
The problems reflected by Ministry of Railways are all objective facts. In fact, among the railway systems of various countries, East Africa is already relatively good. The railway management of the European economic powers is the most sophisticated and the density is relatively high.
The worst is United States Railway. Although United States has a huge number of railways, they are completely capital-oriented. There are more than a thousand railway companies alone. In the absence of a unified and powerful management organization, these large and small railway companies are in serious conflict.
Railways are not only related to economic interests, but also related to national defense, transportation, social and other fields. For example, European countries such as Germany and Austro-Hungarian Empire focus on the military use of railways and emphasize national control, not entirely economic dominance.
Therefore, based on the long-term development of the railway system, the fundamental thing is to improve the efficiency of railway utilization and simultaneously meet the needs of economy, society, transportation, national defense and so on.
To improve railway utilization efficiency and avoid resource waste, a coordinating organization is needed to lead the balance and coordination of various railway uses.
Ernst asked Andre: "What are Ministry of Railways's suggestions on how to improve my country's railway utilization efficiency?"
Andre took out the plan and introduced it to Ernst: "Your Highness, as mentioned before, information exchange is an important means for the railway system to further improve its potential."
"Although East African Railway Network is relatively developed, poor contact and communication between various nodes, or the inability to reach an agreement, will seriously hinder the improvement of railway utilization efficiency."
"Suppose a steel factory Mbeya city produces 20,000 tons more steel every year due to technical reasons. However, due to the lag in recording information in the original railway system, these raw materials cannot be transported, which will inevitably have a negative impact. How to construct a complete information exchange in the railway system can perfectly solve this problem."
"The current mainstream communication methods in the railway system are letters, telegraphs, radios and telephones. Letters are the slowest in efficiency, while telegraphs and telephones have the highest usage rate. However, telegraphs and telephones are also subject to line constraints. For example, a flood disaster leads to a regional power outage, resulting in the loss of communication between two stations, which can easily lead to a regional collapse of the railway system."
"So ensuring multiple information communication methods and establishing a unified information processing platform are the main goals of our Ministry of Railways at the moment, including vigorously promoting the popularization of radio, an equipment that is less restricted by terrain, so as to serve as the second means of railway system communication."
"A unified information processing platform can be used to sort out my country's railway system, reduce intermediate links, and effectively respond to large-scale railway system collapse events."
To put it simply, Ministry of Railways wanted to build a nationwide independent railway communication system. In fact, similar systems existed in the past, but they were mainly defense railway communication systems for military lines, which played a huge role during the South African War period.
The importance of national defense is self-evident, but the majority of railways are still in the economic and people's livelihood fields, so the new communication system mainly serves the economic and people's livelihood fields.
"If it is a new construction, will it cause a waste of resources?" Ernst asked.
Andre explained, "Our idea is not to rebuild a separate line, but to transform and upgrade the existing railway communication system. The existing communication system can be reused, but further optimized. The new lines definitely exist, but they only supplement them, accounting for less than 20%."
Ernst nodded and said, "If that's the case, then this plan should be feasible. Don't rush to transform it first. You should conduct further research and inspection to ensure that nothing goes wrong before proceeding with construction. This is a major event related to the entire railway system. You cannot rush ahead with greed for credit. Even if it cannot be completed within First Five-Year Plan, it can be implemented in Second Five-Year Plan."
Andre nodded and said, "We have the same idea. After all, our construction tasks are also very heavy now. It will be quite difficult to complete the construction of the new 50,000 kilometers of railway during First Five-Year Plan, so we will definitely not be able to devote more energy."
In the decade of the 1990s, East African railway construction barely reached 90,000 kilometers, so the 50,000-kilometer railway construction task has taken up most of the energy of the current railway system.
Of course, this goal is not difficult to achieve. After all, compared with the 1990s, the productivity level of East African railway has definitely improved significantly.
Andre continued, "In addition to the communication system, our second plan is to build a number of new marshalling yards in railway hubs and important economic production areas across the country to improve the efficiency of material allocation."
"Railways are not as flexible as roads, so many materials need to be redistributed uniformly and sent to corresponding areas through marshalling stations. In this regard, East Africa is worse than Europe."
"Europe has high railway density, dense population and cities, high level of economic development, and large freight volume, so railway utilization efficiency is also high. However, many of our cities in East Africa are being built later than railway construction, which further increases the difficulty."
East African cities are developing too fast, so the industrial and material needs of many cities have increased significantly. The development of cities will naturally put forward higher requirements for the transportation industry, which makes the original transportation and regional economic development levels mismatch.
This large volatility will naturally affect the utilization efficiency of East African railway, and it cannot be eliminated at all. After all, there is great uncertainty in urban and regional economic development, especially in industrial and mining cities.
This requires the East African railway system to continuously adjust according to the fluctuation range to minimize the impact. This is actually a happy trouble.
After all, a country like Japan with only a few thousand kilometers of railways is not qualified to encounter such troubles as East Africa.
For a major railway country like East Africa, railway management is also the most difficult, especially when the East African railway pattern has not been stabilized. After all, the mid- and long-term goal of Ernst is to build approximately 300,000 kilometers of railways, and the current East African railway mileage has not yet reached half of this goal.
The only thing that can be determined is the construction of trunk railways. Trunk railways mainly serve national transportation and are less affected by various factors. However, the construction of branch railways is not certain. Due to various factors, their construction is highly uncertain.
"The ultimate goal of the Ministry of Railways gate is to realize the integration of national railways into the grid, thereby achieving top-down unified management of the railway system. In this way, information and resources can be fully utilized to ensure the overall smooth operation of my country's railway operations and to achieve reasonable deployment of railway freight and passenger transport. In this way, the utilization rate of the entire railway system will be greatly improved."
"This railway network will promote the progress of the national railways towards more standardized, efficient and reasonable goals. While ensuring the quantity of railway construction in our country, it will also enhance the quality of railway construction and provide better services for the development of the national economy."
Ernst definitely supports this. Only by adapting to the development needs of the economy and other fields can we ensure the development potential of East African railway and support the sustainable development path of East African railway's career.