Everyday,
there're two trains from Beijing Xizhimen Railway station to Badaling
Great Wall at Qinglongqiao Railway Station, where you can see a bronze statue erected
by the Chinese government. But who was he?
This railway is
very famous in China, known to almost every household, because this railway was the first
of its kind designed and built by us Chinese, it was called Beijing-Zhangjiakou Railway
and recorded in the textbook for primary school pupils.
The chief engineer
is Zhan Tianyou, a Yale graduate majoring in Civil and railway engineering, he was born in
1861 in Guangdong Province, and he was very intelligent and interested in machinery at an
early age. Upon graduation from the Yale University in 1881, he returned to China and
became the Chief engineer in 1905 for the first railway in China, he succeeded in
overcoming the gradient problem by switching back the line, and he initially used two
locomotives instead of one, one pulling, another pushing the train over this area. The
railway was completed in 1909, two years ahead of time. It added a brilliant page in the
history of the Chinese Railway Construction.
Therefore, the
Chinese government decided to erect a bronze statue at Qinglongqiao Railway Station in
memory of his great contribution. |