After hearing the Personal Guard's report, Luo Chong frowned slightly. He rose and said to You Zhi, Moxin, and the other craftsmen, "You eat first. I have some other matters to deal with."
You Zhi, Moxin, and the others hurriedly stood and cupped their hands in farewell. Only after Luo Chong had left the dining hall and arrived with the Personal Guard at a corner of the courtyard did he ask, "What happened with the rail experiment? Wasn't production going smoothly before? How did a problem suddenly appear?"
The guard hurriedly replied, "Reporting to the Chieftain, it wasn't the Narrow Gauge Steel Rail that had a problem. It was the Heavy-duty Steel Rail—the kind that weighs sixty jin per meter.
Over the past two days, the Steel Mill in Xingang Commandery had already completed the Chieftain's production quota of ten thousand Narrow Gauge Steel Rails, and steel bars had also begun to be produced steadily. To use up the excess capacity, the research institute produced a batch of Heavy-duty Steel Rails for actual performance testing. That was when the problem arose.
They laid two kilometers of Heavy-Haul Railway on a slope, then placed a carriage on it and loaded it with an entire carriage full of coal. When they released the brakes and let the carriage slide downhill, it had traveled less than a li when the rails suddenly deformed. The carriage overturned completely, spilling coal all over the ground. Fortunately, no one was injured." The guard gave a detailed report of the news that had been relayed to him.
Luo Chong's brow furrowed even deeper after hearing this. The Narrow-Gauge Railway had already undergone the same kind of experiment. Back then, they hadn't tested it with just one carriage—they had coupled fifteen carriages together, all loaded with ore, and