Wusung Railway

Official opening of the Wusung Railway in 1876

Route length:

14.5 km


	0 mi	Zhabei ( Shanghai )
	4.25 mi	Kiangwan
	9.25 mi	Wusong ( Baoshan )

Opening of the "Woosung road"

Locomotive of the Wusung Railway

business

The Wusung Railway was China's first railway line . It was designed with a narrow gauge of 762 mm and a length of about 14.5 kilometers. The line connected Wusung in today's Baoshan with today's Zhabei in Shanghai . Regular traffic started on July 3, 1876, and the line was dismantled again in 1877.

history

The purpose of the project was based on the following background: The large ocean-going ships that could not go as far as Shanghai were unloaded in Wusung and then the goods were transported into the city by cart. This system should be modernized by a railway.

The British were in charge of building the railway. Since the railroad was recognized as a symbol of colonialism in China during the Qing Dynasty and its construction was prohibited, the following trick was used: The line was simply passed off as the “Waggon-Way”. The “Woosung Road Company” was granted approval in 1875 for this project. So there was no question of a “railroad”. In 1876 the railway was put into operation.

The British fraud was soon exposed, but the Chinese protest went unheeded. On August 3, 1876, however, a local was run over and the Chinese authorities now forced the company to shut down. Operations resumed in December 1876, but only lasted until October 20, 1877. Then the railway buildings were dismantled, the rails torn from the ground and shipped to Taiwan , where they rotted away.

In 1898 another railway line from Wusung to Shanghai was built.

literature

Crush, Peter: Woosung Road. The Story of China's First Railway . Hong Kong 1999.
Currie, Blair C .: The Woosung Railroad (1872-1877) . In: Papers on China 20 (1966), p. 49 ff.

Web links

Individual evidence

^ ^A ^b Zhenhua Chen, Kingsley E. Haynes: Chinese Railways in the Era of High-Speed. Emerald Group, Bingley 2015, ISBN 978-1-78441-985-1 , p. 2.

Coordinates are missing! Help.

[chen-1] A ^b Zhenhua Chen, Kingsley E. Haynes: Chinese Railways in the Era of High-Speed. Emerald Group, Bingley 2015, ISBN 978-1-78441-985-1 , p. 2.