Chapter 74 Section 9 Sweat and Tears in Taiwan

In the 1950s, the situation in Taiwan gradually stabilized.The respite government began to improve life on the island (although the slogan of counterattacking the mainland has been shouted for many years, and a few people have fantasized and looked forward to it for many years), and the modernization of railway transportation is the most important thing.During the Japanese occupation period, all the middle-level and above jobs in the railway bureau were held by Japanese. Before they were defeated and sent back, they told the 17,000 Taiwanese employees that Taiwan's railways would be paralyzed within six months.At that time, it was still up to station attendants to wave red and green flags to get in and out of the station, and it was all up to train conductors to pass armbands neatly in the thick smoke from the locomotive between stations. They were the heroes in the eyes of children who "watched the train".The bureau ordered the electrical service to research scientific and technological equipment to replace manpower (the roads in the city were not even popular with traffic lights at that time), but no one knew where the research started.Chen Shuxi, director of transportation, is a graduate of Jiaotong University.Quite proud, his catchphrase to his subordinates is: "Do you understand?" He mentioned that some western railways have used the CTC system, but no one has seen it.At that time, everyone left the meeting in silence.

After Yuchang returned to Taichung, he never forgot about it.Central Controlled Traffic (CTC for short) is a new concept in telecommunications engineering, and data can only be found in the United States.I know Yang Junxian's brother is teaching in the US, maybe he can help us find the data.At that time, very few people had relatives and friends in the United States, which is unimaginable today. I wrote to Junxian in Taipei, I wonder if brother Yang can help me with this?Unexpectedly, two or three months later, a large and heavy parcel was delivered to our gate at No. 25 Fuxing Road. This parcel opened up the prospect of Yuchang's life's work.

The postal package sent by Junxian contains more than ten copies of "The Theory and Application of American Railroad Signals" published by the Association of American Railroads. The fourth chapter is the detailed description and diagram of CTC, with a total of 177 pages.It is written on the page: "I would like to present this book to Yuchang, Bangyuan and Nephew Siqi to commemorate their third birthday. Yilie and Junxian, August 14th, 42nd year (1953)" This book is not easy to come by. It is a new technology developed by the United States during World War II. Taiwan did not know about it at that time. Brother Yang bought it for academic research.

Yuchang happily read through it for the first time, was very interested, and wrote some notes in order to study it in depth.Decided to translate it into Chinese by hand, which can be summarized and synthesized for an overall understanding.He thought that I would definitely help him, so he gave me the Chinese translation of the introduction, the purpose of the new equipment, and the conditions required for the work. He was responsible for the technical description, telecommunication lines, and important diagrams of operation and operation.Every day after get off work.After finishing the housework and putting the child to sleep (the second son, Sixian, is fifteen months old), we discussed the translation for at least one hour. It took about half a year to complete the Chinese translation of the 166 pages of the book plus more than 100 diagrams.

Yuchang went to the bureau for a meeting and learned that the bureau had officially purchased a set of CTC instructions from the Association of American Railroads.But I don't know where to start the research, and there is no way to start the plan. All the 20 to 30 people in charge of electrical affairs have not received the education of fully automatic control signals, and have never even heard of them.It is said that after the war, the Japanese National Railways installed a semi-automatic vehicle control system with the assistance of the US occupation forces.After the start of the Korean War, Taiwan got some supply business, and the transportation volume of materials on the island to the port increased greatly. The importance of the railway bureau also increased greatly, and there was an urgent need for modern equipment.

The bureau first sent Yuchang and others to Japan, and then led by Mr. Chen Denian to the United States for investigation.After 1954, based on the actual situation of Taiwan's railways, it began to draw up a plan for installing CTC system equipment. First, Yuchang listed in detail the 142 kilometers from Changhua to Tainan (which was still monorail at that time), and the 27 stations. The first phase project of marking machine and driving switch.The Ministry of Manufacturing invited international bids, and Ericsson Company of Sweden won the bid, and construction and installation began in Changhua in 1957.One year before the start of construction, the Railway Bureau sent many electric workers to Sweden for internships in batches.The "Central Controlled Driving System" translated by Yuchang (officially published in 1959) was originally a manuscript of his own interest research, and it has been printed as a simple manual, which is a must-read for engineering personnel.When they went to Sweden to check and accept the equipment to be installed, the person in charge of Ericsson believed that Mr. Loh had an accurate and complete understanding of the communication system and "could talk with him".

However, to the Swedes, Taiwan in 1956 was probably a completely mysterious and unknowable backward area or an undeveloped Asian jungle.Mr. Jobbsson, an engineer they sent to the Taiwan Railway, said goodbye to his family at the airport before taking a flight from Stockholm to Hong Kong for Taiwan. His mother cried as if she was parting from life and death.After he arrived in Taichung for several months, he felt that he could survive, so he brought his wife here.He said that he can travel around the world with 400 English characters. His wife's English is much more than his. When I arrived in Taichung, I saw that I could use more English to help them with their daily necessities.

At that time, no one in Taichung (or the whole of Taiwan) used gas (or gas), and they still used a kind of briquette with a diameter of 17 to 8 centimeters (7 to 8 inches) and many holes for ventilation. Rice is cooked in the stove, and people who are more affluent use charcoal stoves to boil water and make tea.The clerk of the railway bureau rented a newly built small concrete bungalow for the Jacobsson couple, hired a maid who "speaks English" for them, and bought the necessary furniture.At that time, tricycles had just replaced rickshaws. When I sent them to their new home, I pointed them to the tricycle "station" at the entrance of the alley, and wrote down my home address on a piece of paper for them. Telephone).

That night, Mr. Jacobsson knocked on the door in a tricycle. He said there were too many mosquitoes, how could he sleep?The maid said that the tap water was undrinkable. She boiled a large pot of boiling water and it was too hot to drink. She needed several bottles of cold boiled water.I lent him the mosquito net for the guest room and some clean empty rice wine bottles. Two days later, Mrs. Jocobsson came to see me in a tricycle. Soon after sitting down, she burst into tears, saying that her husband went to work at the Changchang Industrial Site in the morning and came home very late, and she was "terribly homesick".I went to find a very beautiful kitten and gave it to her. The little civet cat who was just three months old was very cute and probably comforted her homesickness.I also often go to take her for a walk, but the culture and climate of Taiwan and Sweden are too different, she is really unaccompanied, and she still went back to Sweden after half a year.

The construction site for installing the CTC on the railway was at Changhua Station, a 20-minute drive from Taichung. At that time, the dual-purpose vehicle for public works was the earliest jeep with a canvas top produced by Yulong Company.Every morning, Yuchang took Mr. Jacobsson and Mr. Chen Ximing, the deputy section chief, together, and returned to Taichung together in the evening.After construction, the Chen family moved to the railway dormitory in Changhua.On Sundays, construction continued. My three sons and I often took his caravan to Chen's house, and our favorite was to go to the unused empty cars in the Changhua yard.The children of the Chen family, two men and two women, grew up with my children. Mrs. Chen, Ms. Zhang Qiongxia, and I have become good friends in times of trouble. Over the past fifty years, we have shared the young years of having children and worrying about our husbands. We also watched it together. To the fruits of their work of wisdom and perseverance.She took us to see her ancestral home in Tianzhong, sister Xiluo's house, and to eat and worship at the homes of many electrical colleagues, so as to truly understand the customs of Taiwan.

I, who still can't figure out the magnetic field of the cathode and anode, watched the group of CTC engineering personnel accept the challenge of science and technology regardless of the morning and evening, sort out the veins among those ecstasy-like electrical circuits, and climb mountains and waters to erect the earliest connection of Taiwan's railway modernization. I feel really honored to share their failures and successes, big and small, on the Internet. In 1959, the project entered the most difficult stage.In August, the Daduxi Iron Bridge between Changhua and Taichung was washed away by a typhoon, flooding Changhua City, and CTC's main computer room was in danger. Fortunately, Yuchang stayed in Changhua to catch up with night work that night.The August 7th Flood was one of the biggest typhoon disasters in Taiwan's history. The Dadu River basin was covered with ocean. Until the third morning, the embankments were exposed on both sides of the river, and a small number of emergency repair teams used small rafts to come and go. Yuchang called me, the problem in the main computer room was serious, and asked me to take Mr. JOcObssOn and another Swede, the line expert AnderssOn, from their home to the river, and colleagues from the Taichung Electricity Department would take them to the river by boat. Changhua.In addition, they need to buy some water bottles, biscuits, flashlights, and a change of clothes. They have to live in Changhua until the water is refunded.I had to do it because I had to explain in English what they were going to face, and only I knew who and where the riverside pick-up was. That morning, I took a Yulon van and took two Swedes who couldn’t hide their uneasiness to the bank of Dadu River in Taichung. After soaking in the water, I stepped on a small piece of temporarily “beaten” soil that was still soft. On the embankment, I handed them over to the responders, and watched the small wooden boat carrying the two engineers "dancing" across the torrent in the turbulent yellow turbid flood, and finally reached the opposite place. The dry land came ashore, and the first thing I did was to tell their weeping wives that they had crossed the river safely. July 25th of the second year (1960) was a very commemorative day in the history of Taiwan's railways.After the grand inauguration ceremony, a high-ranking official such as the provincial chairman or the executive president pressed a button, and a train drove from Changhua Station, and was directed by the first fully automatic traffic control signal in Asia to the next station—— ——At Huatan Station, 6.6 kilometers away, when the train arrived at the platform with lights and festoons, Yuchang went home and said that their engineering partners were standing on the rails behind layers of officials (the platform was too narrow), all with tears in their eyes , Everyone got drunk that night. However, the happy days are not yet one day.The next morning, the dispatchers and engineers in the main control room shouted at each other, and everyone's heart was pinched between the dispatcher's fingers; pressing a wrong button is a disaster.And the control panel like the Milky Way galaxy is so complicated that they have never dreamed of in their life. Every mile the train travels, they seem to be running with it.At that time.They seldom go home. When they get home, the phone is immediately tracked down. Yuchang often hears Yuchang yelling to the special railway phone on the wall: "Why are they so stupid! Tell him not to press it randomly, I will come right away..." Then he grabbed The raincoat rushed into the caravan and drove to Changhua by himself.At that time, there were probably only him and the highway bureau on the highway, and bus drivers often stuck out their heads and asked if they were dying. At that time, I took three boys with me, the eldest was nine years old, and the youngest was five years old. I had to attend classes during the day, prepare lessons and correct homework at night, and lived like a spinning top. If there was time for prayer, I only prayed not to crash, because cars And the train seems to be speeding on the brink of disaster. Sure enough, shortly after the Grand Opening, the traffic control had reached Ershui Station. Due to the typhoon, the embankment of Dadu River, which was destroyed by the August 7th flood a year ago, collapsed again, and Changhua was soaked in the torrent again. Bad, the CTC machine fails, and all vans are delayed.A military special vehicle was forced to stop at Shiliu Station in Douliu City (47 kilometers away from Changhua). It was originally a small station for loading gravel. After the disaster, there was no water. The small station was in the wilderness and hundreds of passengers Sleeping under the scorching sun for half a day, it was miserable.The phone in the car could not move, and one officer said that he would not drive again.Just bombard the control room with cannons.However, safety is still the most important thing, and it is only at dusk that we can enter the destination Tanzi Station. Under the huge destructive power of natural disasters, engineering and dispatching personnel have been living in a state of tension day and night for a long time.Gradually, a friendship of sharing weal and woe, supporting each other, and taking turns to be on duty 24 hours a day.Try to solve the problem, although it is extremely hard, all are proud to be able to participate in this epoch-making innovation work.However, four months after the flood, when everything was gradually "on the track", a man-made disaster suddenly occurred; two freight cars collided on the Zhuoshuixi Bridge, and the locomotive behind the train dumped on the beam of the bridge. It was extremely difficult to tow and repair , and on the second day of the collision, it was originally planned to completely change the driving point, and the new timetable has been issued.According to Mr. Cai Renhui, the dispatcher at that time, recalled in his book "Gossip about the Taiwan Railway for Fifty Years": "At this time, all people related to CTC "entered a terrible dream." The train was not operating properly, it can be said It’s extremely bad, and the staff’s “sin” is unimaginable, but to put it in one sentence, it’s unprecedented (hope it won’t happen again).” In an era when railroads were almost the only means of mass transportation, and goods piled up at stations, wagons were as important as passenger cars.After flooding, when the shifts are adjusted and the CTC switchboard cannot be "automatic", they have to return to the old system and use manual command. The waiting time of trucks at intermediate stations is often longer than the time of walking.Changhua’s general control room has 24 stations and 58 telephone speakers in the “station relay room”. During these days, engineering maintenance personnel, station personnel, and train personnel are all competing with each other, and the control room works on four shifts. After hours, everyone was hoarse and exhausted, and Qilisan (traditional medicine for moisturizing the throat) stayed with them, and went home to rest.Sometimes he yelled in his sleep, making his family panic.At that time, that group of people had almost no family life, and those who initially opposed the reform in the General Administration also believed that the electricity department was overreaching and embarrassing everyone.Newspapers (fortunately there is no TV yet) scold and ridicule every day, and there is a cartoon of a passenger getting off the train and walking with an umbrella, arriving at the station before the train.