Good day, train lovers! Its been a while since the full release of Train Valley 2; for us, its been (and still is) a super exciting period, but we are happy and incredibly grateful for the great reception of the game. We feel humbled by your passion and love, so first of all, we want to say thanks to all of our players. We also want to say that this is the start of the journey. Were gathering all your feedback, and rest assured, there are future stations to look forward to! But life (and trains) still goes on, and so do our series of historical vignettes about the real locomotives that have inspired the ones you can find and put to use in Train Valley 2. Prepare your luggage for a long, long trip, for today were crossing the world to the Popular Republic of China. Today we discover the SS8, a popular Chinese train and the last one of our first generation of electric locomotives.

A brief history of the railroad in China

Before we dive into the locomotive of the day, its worth explaining a few key details about the history of rail transport in China a history so turbulent that it helped to topple a ruling dynasty. Creating an efficient railroad network for a country so big that amounts to a whole continent is not exactly an easy endeavor so much that we could say that they are still ongoing. On top of that, they started sort of late: by mid-19th century some top-level politicians and intellectuals called for the building of the first railways, but the very conservative Qing court rejected the idea. Apparently, they thought the steam engines were a clever but useless idea, and they feared the railways would eliminate natural defensive barriers and harm agriculture. Because of this, the very first railroads in China were built by the British in Shanghai but since it didnt have approval from the Qing government, it was dismantled only a year afterward. Just a few years later, the Viceroy of Zhili managed to convince the Empress Dowager to build a railway line from a coal mine to a nearby city. In order to sway her, he built a 2 kilometers railway from her residence to her dining hall. Even though, according to stories, the Empress was worried that the steam locomotive would disturb the feng shui of the imperial city and had the train pulled by eunuch slaves, in the end, she approved the construction of the railway line. In the next years, railway construction lived a fast development: Chinas defeat in the first Sino-Japanese War convinced the government of the need for modernization and the most powerful nations of the world were also pressing to get concessions to build railways, settlements, and mines in China. In the course of 15 years, Britain, France, Germany, the United States, Japan, Russia, and even Belgium build around 9,000 km of rails. This interference, in turn, angered the Chinese, which prompted the government to permit provinces to create local railway companies and sell shares to the public. Some of these provinces bankrupted, though, and the Qing government sought to nationalize these local companies and offer them to foreign banks in exchange for loans. Now hold on tight, this gets interesting. This attempt at nationalization angered the public even more, and it sparked the creation of the Railway Protection Movement. The government dispatched troops to suppress this movement. A still-secret revolutionary movement took the opportunity to launch an attack, the Wuchan Uprising. And this uprising kickstarted the Xinhai Revolution, the war that overthrew the Qing Dynasty. In a nutshell: a two-thousand years old imperial dynasty ended because they tried to take some peoples trains away. You dont mess with train lovers! The first half of the 20th century was marked by World War II and the Chinese Civil War that established the Popular Republic of China. Some railways were dismantled as a war strategic measure, some others were created. In 1949, China had around 22,000 km of usable railway network a low number for a country that big. After decades of war, the communist government rolled up their metaphorical sleeves and put themselves to work. In the first five years, 6,100 km of new railway were built. The Great Leap Forward was a mixed bag, with misguided efforts that pushed the Chinese railroad and engines beyond their capacity causing lots of accidents and problems. Ironically, they tried so hard that it actually slowed down the construction, in some places for decades. Despite some improvements in the system, the Cultural Revolution slowed down the building of new railways, and only new 16,000 km were set (when their initial goal was of more than 100,000 km by the 70s). During the 80s construction pretty much stopped, with government money going elsewhere although it was also the time when steam engines were replaced by diesel and electric locomotives. And we arrive at last at the protagonist of the day, the SS8.
(Photo from Wikipedia)

China Railways SS8, the Broom

The Shaoshan 8 (SS8 from now on) is a semi-high-speed electric locomotive, the eighth iteration of the dynasty of Chinese electric locomotives. Diesel and electric engines took more time to become popular in China because labor was so cheap that steam was still under use until the 80s. The first SS1 was built during the 60s; the first SS8 was produced in 1994, and it's batch production started three years later. Its a BoBo machine, a quite popular axle arrangement that weve seen in many other machines by now: two bogies with two powered axles. Their first route was the Kingguan Line, which linked Beijing with Guangzhou; currently, it serves the ShanghaiKowloon and the BeijingKowloon lines, two of the most popular lines in China (and quite long: they take 20 and 23 hours respectively). Kowloon is the old name of the train station in Hong Kong; as you surely can figure, trains from Shanghai and Beijing to Hong Kong are of key importance. The SS8 pantograph had to be adapted to access Hong Kong, and until last year it was the only electric train allowed to enter the city. Thanks to this, the SS8 is a true icon of the recent past of the Chinese railroad network. The SS8 was, for some time, the fastest Chinese locomotive: in 1998 it broke the Chinese speed record with a top speed of 239,6 km/h on a test run. That record lasted for some time until the popularization of high-speed trains in China during the 00s. Its nickname is the Broom but to be honest, we have no idea why it is called that maybe because it sweeps the railway leaving nothing behind? Weve tried to find a reliable source to confirm it but we couldnt find any, so if any of our Chinese-speaking players can clarify the story, well be happy to update this blog! And what about the in-game version of the SS8? You can see the serious-looking front, with its square windows and protruding nose, and the iconical stripped plow. The long board on its side and the pantograph are also very recognizable. This machine is used to crossing very long distances and wont stop at anything! This post ends the first generation of the Electric Era; were getting close to the present day, with trains that still populate their countries railways. In the next blog of this series, were traveling to Germany to discover a very interesting train that you still can find easily in todays German railways. Stay tuned! tvloco ---- tvhook Train Valley 2 Discord Server. tv2computer Our Twitter.