Railway

That's right, a fully laid railway capable of running trains!

Li Qingsong wasn't doing this because he had nothing better to do. He had more than sufficient and necessary reasons.

The reason was simple. This Steel Factory alone could produce around 270 tons of steel per day, which translated to a need for at least 1,000 tons of iron ore every day.

And that was only for the steel itself. The Steel Factory also needed a corresponding Power Plant.

There was no coal on Luoshen Star, and tholin couldn't be used for steelmaking, so all steelmaking operations had to use electricity instead.

That meant it was bound to be a massive consumer of power.

Calculations showed that Li Qingsong consumed around 600 kilowatt-hours of electricity for every ton of steel he produced.

At 270 tons a day, that came to 162,000 kilowatt-hours!

Its power consumption could even surpass that of the entire Main Base at present.

Such an enormous power demand could not be drawn from the existing grid. The load fluctuations would be too severe, and the grid would collapse.

A dedicated Power Plant had to be built to supply it.

At the current stage, every kilowatt-hour Li Qingsong generated consumed 1.2 kilograms of tholin ore and 0.5 kilograms of oxygen ore, for a total of 1.7 kilograms.

To generate 162,000 kilowatt-hours, he needed roughly 300 tons of tholin ore and oxygen ore!

Combined with the iron ore, the Steel Factory and Power Plant needed to be supplied with at least 1,300 tons of materials every day on average.

Transporting that much material by tractor would be impossible even if every existing tractor were put into service.

Besides, even if there were enough tractors, there still had to be enough drivers to operate them. That was another expense for Li Qingsong.

After giving it some thought, Li Qingsong decided to go all the way and simply build a railway.

This railway would not only connect Iron Mine No. 1, but also several nearby oxygen mines. It could even extend toward several nearby tholin-rich deposits, copper mines, and aluminum mines. When the time came, all it would take was a few branch lines to connect them all.

Thirteen hundred tons was far too much for tractors, but for a train, a single run could haul it all away.

A railway could run far more than one train. With proper scheduling, more than a dozen trains could operate simultaneously. By then, this railway's transport capacity would be far more than a mere few thousand tons.

Not only would it fully meet the needs of the current Steel Factory and Power Plant, it could even meet the needs of more Steel Factories and Power Plants later on, as well as additional gold, silver, copper, and aluminum smelters!

This railway had to be built.

Li Qingsong had already completed the preliminary survey work.

As for the knowledge needed to build a railway, he had learned the basic principles from the Deep Space spacecraft, while the clones' hard work and accumulated experience had filled in the rest.

Everything was ready now. All that remained was to build it.

The railway would have a total length of thirty-three kilometers. It would pass through three hillsides and cross two ravines, with four stations in total: Main Base Departure Station, Iron Mine Terminus, and the intermediate Oxygen Mine Station and Tholin Station.

From then on, all of Li Qingsong's primary production capacity was devoted to manufacturing rails and connectors.

Although the Steel Factory could not operate at full capacity at the moment, its current output was more or less enough to meet the needs of building a railway.

Eight hundred clones worked from multiple points at once, beginning construction simultaneously from several locations to speed up progress.

One team of clones arrived before a mountain that lay in the path of the railway.

The mountain stood around a hundred meters tall. On Luoshen Star, it counted as nothing more than a small hill.

The clones first used Electric Heating Equipment to clear away the solid gases covering its surface. Then they drilled directly into it, stuffed Explosives produced by the Chemical Factory several meters deep inside, and detonated them.

With a slight tremor through the ground, the massive rocks split apart, and a gap was blasted straight through the mountain.

The clones swarmed forward, each one like a strongman as they carried away the enormous boulders and tossed them elsewhere.

After all, Luoshen Star's gravity was low, making it easy to move rocks.

For larger boulders, several of them worked together. Anything bigger still was handled by steam bulldozers belching black smoke, which forcibly shoved them away.

Li Qingsong did not need to worry about where to pile up the rubble. Unlike on Earth, he did not have to go through the trouble of hauling it away to designated locations.

There was no one here to enforce environmental protection, anyway.

Under these conditions, the work of blasting through mountains and building the road progressed smoothly and quickly.

While explosives boomed on one side, dozens of clones gathered before a ravine on Luoshen Star's surface on the other.

The gorge was more than a hundred meters wide. Going around it would add a full dozen or more kilometers to the railway.

Li Qingsong did not want that kind of trouble, so he simply built a bridge.

Li Qingsong could not build a modern bridge like those on Earth, with rigorous validation, precise mechanical design, and specialized high-performance materials.

But that did not matter. Gravity on Luoshen Star was low, so the load capacity of the same bridge could increase more than tenfold out of thin air.

For the same load requirements, the demands on material performance and construction techniques would likewise drop more than tenfold.

It only needed to support trains. For such a small weight, a simple steel framework would be more than enough.

That was what Li Qingsong thought, and that was what he did.

He did not even build steel pillars from the bottom of the gorge to support the bridge. Instead, he merely fixed steel frames into the rock walls on both sides and used a mechanical structure similar to an arch bridge to hold it up.

It saved both time and steel. After all, his steel production capacity was still limited.

As for whether its performance was sufficient and whether it could support the bridge and trains, there was absolutely no problem.

Even if two fully loaded trains crossed at the same time, along with the bridge's own weight, the total mass would be no more than around four thousand tons. Its actual weight would only be a few hundred tons. It was a steel structure, after all. There was no way it could not support a mere few hundred tons.

Laying the rails was even simpler and more direct.

Thanks to Luoshen Star's surface being frozen extremely solid by the low temperatures, Li Qingsong did not need to do any road hardening beyond the initial leveling work.

He simply laid the four rails for the two tracks on supports and secured them. Then, every few dozen meters, he fastened each pair of rails together.

It was not only convenient, but also saved steel.

There was even less need for guardrails. There were no people or animals running around everywhere on Luoshen Star.

With every aspect of construction focused on practicality, work on the bridge, rail laying, and blasting through mountains progressed rapidly.

While everything went smoothly here, Li Qingsong devoted a considerable portion of his attention to Mechanical Factory No. 1.

Here, Li Qingsong planned to build two locomotives.

And they would no longer be steam-powered locomotives, but electric ones!