African Entrepreneurship Records 2

Chapter 1004 Railway Network Integration
"my country's railway system consists of many components, with a wide variety of departments and enterprises, including large state-owned railway companies, railways built by mining companies, urban railways, regional railways, railways dedicated to other types of enterprises, railways dedicated to agricultural areas, and so on."

"The summary is that there are many railways of different sizes, which are difficult to manage and difficult to connect to the railway network. The national trunk railway network is relatively easy to deal with, but the connection between small railways, straight railways, etc. and trunk railways is not close."

"The most typical example is the railway in mining areas, where the construction of railways is restricted by the distribution of resources, especially in the southern and central regions."

"National trunk railways are the main arteries of East Africa's railway network, while branch lines and other types of railways are capillaries. The primary problem East Africa is facing now is that the connection between capillaries and main arteries is not smooth, which leads to inefficient logistics and passenger flow scheduling in blood, that is, economic development."

The problems reflected by the Ministry of Railways are all objective facts. In fact, among the railway systems of various countries, East Africa is already relatively good. The railway management of the economic powers in Europe is the most sophisticated and the density is relatively high.

The worst is the American railways. Although the United States has a huge number of railways, it is completely capital-oriented. There are more than a thousand railway companies alone. In the absence of a unified and powerful management agency, these large and small railway companies are seriously fighting each other.

Railways are not only related to economic interests, but also to national defense, transportation, society and other fields. Take European countries such as Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire as examples. They focus on the military use of railways, emphasize state control, and are not completely dominated by the economy.

Therefore, the long-term development of the railway system depends fundamentally on improving the utilization efficiency of railways and at the same time meeting economic, social, transportation, national defense and other needs.

If we want to improve the efficiency of railway utilization and avoid waste of resources, we need a coordinating organization to lead the balance and coordination of various uses of railways.

Ernst asked Andre: "What are the suggestions of the Ministry of Railways on how to improve the efficiency of railway utilization in our country?"

Andre took out the plan and introduced it to Ernst: "Your Highness, as mentioned before, information exchange is an important means for the railway system to further improve its potential."

“Although the East African railway network is relatively developed, the poor connection and communication between the various nodes, or the inability to reach consensus, will seriously hinder the improvement of railway utilization efficiency.”

“Suppose a steel plant in Mbeya produces 20,000 tons more steel each year due to technical reasons, but the original railway system records information lags, which makes it impossible to transport these raw materials. This is bound to have a negative impact. How to build a perfect information exchange system for the railway system can perfectly solve this problem.”

"The mainstream communication methods of the railway system are letters, telegraphs, radio and telephones. Letters are the slowest, while telegraphs and telephones are the most used. However, telegraphs and telephones are also restricted by lines. For example, if a flood disaster causes a regional power outage, the connection between two stations is lost, which can easily lead to a regional collapse of the railway system."

"Therefore, ensuring multiple information communication methods and establishing a unified information processing platform are the main goals of our Ministry of Railways at present, including vigorously promoting the popularization of radio, which is less restricted by terrain, as a second means of communication for the railway system."

“And the unified information processing platform can be used to sort out my country’s railway system, reduce intermediate links, and effectively respond to large-scale railway system collapse events.”

Simply put, the Ministry of Railways wants to build a nationwide independent railway communication system. In fact, similar systems have existed in the past, but they are mainly military lines of the National Defense Railway Communication System, which played a huge role during the South African War.

The importance of national defense is self-evident, but the majority of railways are still in the economic and people's livelihood fields, so the new communication system's main service objects are also the economic and people's livelihood fields.

"If it is a new construction, will it cause a waste of resources?" Ernst asked.

Andre explained: "Our idea is not to rebuild a separate line, but to transform and upgrade the existing railway communication system. The existing communication system can be reused, but it will be further optimized. New lines will definitely exist, but they will only supplement it, accounting for less than 20%." Ernst nodded and said, "If that's the case, then this plan should be feasible. Don't rush to transform it. You still need to conduct further research and investigation to ensure that there is no risk before carrying out construction. This is a major event related to the entire railway system. Don't be greedy and rush. Even if it cannot be completed within the First Five-Year Plan, it can be implemented in the Second Five-Year Plan."

Andre nodded and said, "We think the same way. After all, our construction tasks are very heavy now. It is quite difficult to complete the construction of the new 50,000 kilometers of railway during the First Five-Year Plan, so we definitely can't devote more energy to it."

In the decade of the 1990s, East African railway construction barely reached 90,000 kilometers, so the task of building 50,000 kilometers of railways has already occupied most of the energy of the current railway system.

Of course, this goal is not easy to achieve. After all, compared with the 1990s, the productivity level of East African railways has definitely increased significantly.

Andre continued: "In addition to the communication system, our second plan is to build a number of new marshaling yards in national railway hubs and important economic production areas to improve the efficiency of material allocation."

"Railways are not as flexible as roads, so a lot of materials need to be redistributed and sent to corresponding areas through marshaling yards. In this regard, we in East Africa are a little worse than Europe."

"Europe has a high railway density, dense population and cities, high economic development level and large freight volume, so the railway utilization efficiency is also high. However, the construction of many cities in East Africa was even later than that of railways, which further increased the difficulty."

East African cities are developing too fast, so the demand for industries and materials in many cities has increased significantly. The development of cities will naturally place higher demands on the transportation industry, which leads to a mismatch between the original transportation and regional economic development levels.

This greater volatility will naturally affect the utilization efficiency of East African railways and cannot be eliminated at all. After all, there is great uncertainty in urban and regional economic development, especially in industrial and mining cities.

This requires the East African railway system to constantly make adjustments based on the fluctuation range to minimize the impact. This is actually a happy trouble.

After all, a country like Japan, which only has a few thousand kilometers of railways, is not qualified to encounter the kind of trouble that East Africa has.

For a country like East Africa that has a large railway network, railway management is also the most difficult, especially when the railway structure in East Africa has not stabilized. After all, Ernst's medium- and long-term goal is to build about 300,000 kilometers of railways, and now the railway mileage in East Africa has not even reached half of this goal.

The only thing that can be confirmed is the construction of trunk railways, which mainly serve the national transportation and are less affected by various factors. However, this is not necessarily the case for branch railways, as their construction carries great uncertainty due to various constraints.

"The ultimate goal of the railway department is to realize the integration of the national railway network, so as to achieve unified management of the railway system from top to bottom. In this way, we can make full use of information and resources to ensure the overall smooth operation of my country's railways and realize the reasonable allocation of railway freight and passenger transport. In this way, the utilization rate of the entire railway system will be greatly improved."

"This railway network will promote the national railway to be more standardized, efficient and reasonable. While ensuring the quantity of railway construction in my country, it will also enhance the quality of railway construction and provide better services for the development of the national economy."

Ernst certainly supports this. Only by adapting to the development needs of the economy and other fields can the development potential of East African railways be guaranteed and the sustainable development path of East African railway industry be supported.

(End of this chapter)