Jining–Tongliao railway

Since Inner Mongolia was one of the poorer provinces of China in the early 1990s, the line was built with an eye towards reducing startup costs, with the intention of upgrading at a future date as funds became available.

The tracks were built to a high engineering standard, featuring heavy rail, concrete crossties, and extensive use of tunnels and viaducts to reduce grades.

In contrast, lower-cost anachronistic technologies were intentionally selected for cases where it was possible to upgrade incrementally: semaphore signaling, staffed crossing gates, and steam engines.

[1] Due to low labor costs and plentiful coal, China was one of the last countries to retire steam locomotives on mainline services.

As dieselisation and electrification progressed in the early 1990s, China Railways found itself with a large stock of surplus steam locomotives, some built as recently as the late 1980s.