The ever-efficient Bulgarian government had the Ministry of Transport immediately organize a team of experts for on-site surveys once the railway project was approved. Beyond terrain and landforms, they also had to consider the human and economic factors, as well as future directions of development.
They could hardly place a railway station a hundred li outside a city, could they? If they did, how the hell was the railway supposed to drive the regional economy? Transporting supplies alone would be enough to make people collapse!
Of course, Bulgaria did not carry much historical baggage in this regard. Outside the Balkan Peninsula, cities in other regions had to be rebuilt anyway, so their sites could be coordinated with one another. There was no need for the railway to yield to the cities and artificially inflate construction costs!
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the greatest problems in building railways were money, materials, and manpower. Now, money was naturally not an issue for the Ministry of Transport, nor were materials. Domestic steel enterprises were expanding their production capacity, and meeting demand would not be a problem.
Manpower, however, was troublesome. Two months ago, the Bulgarian government had still been wracking its brains over the refugee problem. Now the refugee camps had been emptied, and major companies had all joined the war to snatch workers. The direct result was a twenty-percent increase in Bulgaria's average wage.
Agricultural companies and railway companies fought the fiercest over labor. Agricultural companies needed to reclaim vast stretches of wilderness. Even with mechanized farming techniques, the sudden addition of tens of millions of hectares of land still required plenty of workers!
Railway companies needed no explanation. They had work coming out of their ears. Even though the new round of the Grand Railway Project had yet to