Chronicle of the Yunnan-Vietnam Line - Train

Before leaving Kunming, we went to the Railway Museum, which was the perfect ending to this trip.

The theme of the walk was the Yunnan-Vietnam Railway, and the two train rides were quite nostalgic. But for my hurried life in the past few decades, even though I have taken countless trains from north to south, I don’t know much about this behemoth whizzing past on the railway tracks.

The two-story museum is not large, but it is enough for us to understand the Southwest Railway Hub and China Unicom and its development history.

When the Yunnan-Vietnam Railway was built, the British also wanted to build a Yunnan-Burma Railway. Later, it was not built for some reason, which gave the French a chance. At that time, there were several railways under construction across the country. It is an eternal truth that if you want to develop and get rich, you must first build roads.

After the railway was built, the huge thing on the rails changed people's way of life like an iron dragon. The journey that used to take months has been shortened to a few weeks thanks to trains, and various short-distance shuttles are also more flexible and convenient. At the same time, trade along the railway line also developed rapidly.

The earliest trains in China were steam locomotives, which used coal (and a small amount of wood) as fuel to fully burn the water to heat and boil it to steam, which was transmitted through heat pipes to convert the steam heat energy into mechanical energy, thus driving the train. The wheels roll.

Because of the railway, people were freed to carry horses and the efficiency of transportation was greatly improved. People travel and migrate more frequently. The first time people looked at the locomotive coming slowly from the railway track with its loud whistle, people felt a bit of surprise, nervousness and excitement, because when they stepped on the train, they would go where they wanted to go instead of their feet or horse's hooves. distance.

When I saw the huge black body and the big cylindrical front, I felt a little shocked. The thick steel makes people look insignificant next to it.

I think back to the first time I took a train. It was when I was very young, about three or four years old. I took the green train from Shanghai North Railway Station to Suzhou. At that time, coal was probably burned to generate power.

In the large exhibition hall, the green train is very eye-catching, and it once seemed that it was synonymous with trains. After the reform and opening up, economic development seems to have been put on a locomotive, and it is booming. This applies to all walks of life, including railways.

Green leather cars have experienced two or three generations of development. At first, coal was burned, and later, diesel locomotives were burned. The power is stronger than burning coal, and the speed is faster than a slow train. We call it ordinary speed.

The color of this green leather car is the collective memory of our generations. Entering the new century, diesel internal combustion engines are slowly being replaced by electric trains that use overhead cables to draw electricity through motor brushes to generate power. We have direct express trains, express trains and bullet trains again.

At the same time, as roads, especially highways, are connected to various provincial highways, and with the rapid development of air routes, we have more diversified travel choices. The colors of the trains are also red, white and blue. However, many eventually returned to the original olive green.

Also on display in the hall is the Michelin locomotive that I have never ridden on. It is a unique scenery on the Yunnan-Vietnam Railway. The body is painted in snow-white paint, and paired with its swollen curved locomotive, it looks cute and eye-catching. The most secretly surprising thing is that it was equipped with rubber tires in the 1930s, replacing the original iron wheels and running on the rails. If you look closely at those wheels, you can see that they have not aged or cracked.

Nowadays, the most popular train in China is the Harmony electric train. We call it high-speed train. I remember that when Shanghai and Beijing were opened to traffic, I took a special ride and arrived in four hours and fifty-six minutes. It was really fast.

Today, with the railway network extending in all directions, no matter where we go, we never feel that it is far away. Not to mention there are shipping routes.

There are many old photos displayed on the wall on the second floor, which are historical records of the construction of the Yunnan-Vietnam Railway a hundred years ago. There are the local customs of ethnic minorities, the rise of national capital, and the struggle for separation of rights of way... Let us walk along the way with footnotes on details.

Looking down from the second floor of the exhibition hall, four locomotives and several carriages are neatly arranged, which is somewhat spectacular. Yunnan is a province on the southwest border of my country. Before the Tang Dynasty, it was called a foreign land, which meant that the culture of the Central Plains could not penetrate. Large-scale reclamation and border garrisoning brought many immigrants from Zhejiang and Sichuan provinces to move in. Coupled with the completion of the Yunnan-Vietnam Railway, this also objectively accelerated the introduction of Western science and technology.

Time flies, and hundreds of years are like a blink of an eye. I can’t help but feel grateful for the Kunming Railway Bureau’s sentiments in remembering a period of history.