Mei Zixiang guide:
Comrade-in-arms Lu Kuiyuan sent me a number of collections of his published works, and sent me electronic versions of some of his works through WeChat. I'm too busy to read only a few of them, recommending articles that I think readers will like.
Between people, some people are estranged after understanding, while others are close on the contrary. I have known Kui Yuan for many years, and he contributed to the literary supplement I edited, and I edited and distributed it, and I met several times during this period. His speech is nasal, Shanxi's native accent is heavy, and his speech speed is slow, giving people the impression of simplicity and kindness. I have read his works and know that he graduated from junior high school, worked as a cook in the army, and dug tunnels. The starting point of writing is low, but he is ambitious, loves writing, and has achieved a lot. Wen is like his person, his works are real, he doesn't sing high-pitched, he is not good as a teacher, I like it.
This article is written to hit the tunnel. How good it is to have the experience of tunneling in life, to break through the ghost gate, and to cherish life more. Kui Yuan wrote very carefully, hitting the blast hole, igniting the gun, picking the slag, removing the slag, etc., and recorded the whole process. My respect for him is that he was buried in a tunnel collapse and was a survivor. I didn't know before - many of my comrades-in-arms of the railway soldiers who I didn't know probably had the experience of escaping death like Kui Yuan; And those who are suffering from the occupational disease silicosis.
If you write about the railroad soldiers and read the railroad soldiers, you will love the railroad soldiers.
The military is not emotional
Lu Kuiyuan
The former railroad soldiers have gone through 75 spring and autumn seasons, and I have traveled through 45 years of time and space since I joined the army. The six-year life of the railway construction company is an important experience in my life, which has endless memories and has been deeply engraved in my mind.
When I was a child, I was very envious and admired the soldiers who wore grass green military uniforms. At the end of 1975, after graduating from junior high school, I returned to the village to work as a farmer for two years, and the current situation of worrying about food and clothing gave me the dream of seeing the world outside the mountains, so I chose to become a soldier without hesitation. In the spring of 1978, he walked into a ravine between Korla and Tashdian, and became a railway soldier in the 11th Company of the 3rd Battalion of the 22nd Regiment of the 5th Iron Division, joining the ranks of the Southern Xinjiang Railway Construction Army.
In 1973, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China decided to invest in the construction of the Turpan-Korla section of the 476.5-kilometer-long Southern Xinjiang Railway. At the end of 1973, the advance personnel of the two regiments of the 5th, 6th and 4th Divisions entered Xinjiang, and later large units entered Xinjiang one after another. The construction of 29 tunnels, 463 bridges and more than 30 million cubic meters of earth and stone of the South Xinjiang Railway started in April 1974. The 11th Company of the 3rd Battalion I belong to is going all out to excavate the 3,131-meter-long guide pit under the exit of the Kurutag Tunnel in the Korla-Tashdian section of the Southern Xinjiang Railway, the 9th Company is responsible for the lining of the side walls and arches, the 12th Company is building a railway bridge more than 300 meters long, and the 15th Company is a mechanical company, which is responsible for the normal operation of the two pressurized fans, the maintenance of the air gun, the transportation of slag by the battery car and the bucket truck, as well as the electricity consumption of tunnels, bridges, battalion headquarters and companies. The 2nd and 4th battalions organized manpower and equipment to attack the tunnel entrance, and more than 2,000 troops from the 3 battalions conquered a tunnel, which was a microcosm of the backwardness of productive forces in the seventies and eighties.
Because the high-pressure air duct is directly connected to the air gun, only two air guns can be used to drill holes at the same time, this old air gun has many failures, large fuel consumption, large smoke, low efficiency, and compared with more than 10 and more than 20 air guns of the new type of air guns drilling at the same time, there is a world of difference. There are no workbenches, no lining trolleys, no mixers, and no water in tunnel operations. The 11th company is a construction company, organized into 4 platoons and 12 squads, with one "air gun squad" in each platoon. The air gunner manipulated two air guns to drill the blast holes, and the sound of the "suddenly" air guns sounded for more than 3 hours before they could successfully drill more than 40 blast holes at a depth of 2 meters. After the blast hole was drilled, all the other personnel returned to the company, and the gunner carefully loaded the detonator and explosives in the blast hole, and after loading, all the cannon twists were ignited, and the tunnel was quickly evacuated. When the gunners withdrew fifty or sixty meters away, the deafening sound of artillery resounded throughout the tunnel, making people's hearts tremble. I lit several cannons with Fan Daoyuan, a Sichuan veteran who joined the army in 1975, and the sound of the cannons was almost beyond the limit of what one person could bear.
After the cannon sounded, the tunnel was filled with thick smoke, and the pressure fan outside the tunnel conveyed high-pressure air exhaust smoke to the tunnel through a steel pipe with a diameter of about 20 centimeters. The first few hundred meters are still effective, and beyond 500 meters, the wind is greatly weakened, and the smoke and dust cannot be exhausted within an hour. Before the smoke cleared, a team of people from the slag removal team hurriedly entered the tunnel face with a rake and a small dustpan woven with rattan to perform a 6-hour slag removal task. The person in front of him holds an iron rake to put the gravel into the dustpan, and the person behind quickly passes the dustpan, which can be loaded with a bucket car of 3 cubic meters, and it is filled with gravel in more than 10 minutes. This section is full and then the next section is loaded, and when the eight or nine bucket trucks are all full, the soldiers of the 15th company drive the battery car to drag the bucket truck along the small track to the slag dump. Another battery car drove into the hole with a string of gourd-like bucket trucks, and a new round of picking, loading, and transporting stone slag began, and the cycle repeated, and this shift had to finish a row of twenty or thirty cubic stone slag blasted out before leaving work. The maximum excavation in a month exceeded 110 meters.
The bucket truck and the supporting battery car used for tunnel slag removal were special equipment for coal mines before the 70s, and were used in the construction of hundreds of tunnels along the South Xinjiang Railway. Manually transporting gravel is heavy physical work, encountering two or three hundred, three or four hundred pounds of large stones, several people can work together to load into the bucket truck. They are all young people around 20 years old, strong and strong, and most of them are from the countryside, they can endure hardships, and they will use their strength.
Compared with the "slag removal class", the "air gun class" is still relatively "popular", and each person can receive a small bag of milk powder and a pound of sugar nutrition every month. But the dust is very harmful to the body, the drill hole is a dry air gun, the dust concentration blown out of the blast hole by the high-pressure wind is very high, the smoke mixed with oil smoke and dust is permeated in the narrow hole, the visibility is very low, and no one can be seen from a meter away. The air gunners all wore dust masks, but the sealing effect was poor, and some of the white dust and oil smoke still entered the human respiratory tract.
I was in the air gun class, I was not tall, I had little strength, and it was very difficult to control the air gun. In October of that year, the tunnel pit was successfully broken through and joined forces with the 2nd and 4th Battalions. After the construction of the pilot pit began, continue to drill the blast hole, fire, the gravel from the middle layer of the funnel into the bucket car, compared to the lower pit construction is much easier, but there is no supporting rock mass, collapse is a common thing. I experienced two landslides, one time I was working with my head, suddenly I heard a "bang" sound, the cave was suddenly dark, I was buried in the chest by the pouring stones, the helmet and flashlight were missing, I felt that something was wrong! Fortunately, there were no injuries, and there was no danger. Some of the soldiers were wounded by stones, and some gave their young lives.
The harsh construction environment did not stop us from advancing to the heart of the mountain, the upper guide pit was through, and the middle guide pit was also taken down by the soldiers without danger. The arches and side wall lining were advanced by the 14th Company. We were responsible for the construction of more than 1 meter thick concrete at the bottom of the cable trough and tunnel. Like the soldiers of the 14th Company, they carried a basket on their shoulders and two people to transport sand and gravel and cement from outside the cave, and mixed concrete with shovels on two iron sheets spread out at the site. Our sweat was endless, the appearance of our overalls was almost intact, most of the cotton was exposed, and our comrades-in-arms wore dusty cotton clothes and trousers on the way back to the camp from the tunnel, thinking that they were wearing sheepskins. A face with sweat and cement ash, if you don't look closely, you can't recognize who it is.
In May 1979, the tunnel was fully completed, and we moved to the stage of artificial production of ballast. The tools used are iron forks, iron hammers, and iron hooks, and the piles of tunnel slag are processed into 3-7 cm of special ballast for the roadbed, and a person can also knock out more than 20 cubic meters per month, and more than 30 cubic meters at most. After the ballast basically meets the needs of the roadbed, concentrate manpower on the roadbed and complete the roadbed. On the track, a two-wheeled vehicle loaded with two baskets of ballast was pushed, and ballast was laid along the road, and some people picked up ten pickaxes to smash the road and used iron rods to pry the rails to move the position. With a lot of strength and strength, it didn't take long to complete the task of ballast the roadbed at the exit end of the tunnel in the Sanying management area. At 18 o'clock on November 30, 1979, the track-laying arrived at Korla West Station, the terminal station of the Southern Xinjiang Railway, and the Turpan-Korla section was completed in its entirety.
In the summer of 1981, the 11th and 15th companies left the tunnel exit and went to the tunnel entrance in Tashdian to complete the ballast laying and whole road construction of more than 10 kilometers of line. After this task is drawn, it is moved to Korla East Station, and the heating, tap water and rain sewage pipe ditch with a depth of 1 meter to 6 meters are manually excavated, the pipeline is installed, and the ground of the station is leveled and poured, the labor intensity is very high, and the task of dividing the squad row every day falls to the head, saline-alkali soil, very hard, and the excavation of shovels and ten picks is very laborious, but there is no price to say, and the task of the day must be completed on the same day.
Although I do heavy physical work every day and have a lot of physical exertion, I am glad that the dormitory with the original structure of adobe, linoleum, bamboo poles, and reed mats has been transformed into a cardboard mobile house, and my living conditions have been greatly improved by watching television. The important thing is that it is relatively close to the city of Korla, and there are no buses, so it is a pleasure to walk more than 10 kilometers round trip to the street.
One day in the second half of 1982, when they learned that the railway soldiers had been revoked and merged into the Ministry of Railways, the moment to change their fate was coming. On January 1, 1984, 148,000 railway commanders and fighters reluctantly bid farewell to the military flag, took off their military uniforms and put on blue uniforms, and turned into employees of China Railway Construction, opening a new course of life.
July 19, 2023
Lu Kuiyuan, born in 1960, has been in the army for six years and has been a middle-level cadre of a central enterprise. Since 1991, he has published about 5 million words of novels, poems, essays, reports, essays, reviews and news works in many media across the country, such as People's Daily, Workers' Daily and Economic Daily, and more than 8,000 news and art photographs. He is the author of the essay collections "Taste Life", "Wandering Life" and "Talking about Life", the collection of current reviews "Another Eye on the World", and the art photography album "The Beauty of Nature". He is a member of the Henan Writers Association.
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