A few weeks ago, we visited the Yunnan Railway Museum:
It is very well done (especially if you’re an engineer), charting the vivid history of railroad construction and modernization throughout our province.
The English descriptions throughout the museum were unusually clear. Documentation included strong adjectives that didn’t gloss over historical perspectives :
The museum contains relics and photos of the massive project to build a railroad between Kunming and Haiphong, Vietnam (530 miles). 250,000 workers spent seven years on the project which opened for traffic in 1910. The terrain was formidable and claimed over 60,000 lives:
The sections of rail came from all over the world, including America:
The corridors of the museum are well decorated and begged for a typical family pose:
A huge train room houses locomotives and cars:
including this engine that ran on the original narrow-gauge track to Vietnam. Made by Baldwin in Philadelphia, it weighed in at 25 tons:
When you look at the “control panel,” it clearly took an engineer to operate:
It didn’t take too long for things to grow, as you can tell by this wide-gauge locomotive produced in China at an operating weight of 140 tons:
Now, we have high speed, elevated trains spreading across the country. Things have certainly changed since those first explorers scouted out the best routes for new rail lines!
Really interesting…! Amazing to think it cost 60k lives (and who knows how much of their time the full 250k spent on it). At the time, I can imagine all those making and leading the sacrifice thought about how it was worth it — opening up communication and transportation lines to a new portion of the country. And now we have a myriad of alternatives… Suppose that puts it into perspective a bit.
Our grandsons would love this kind of a place! Several are already interested in that sort of a thing—a couple are showing that “engineering” gene thing. Haha. Thanks for sharing another interesting part of your life there.