Xizang North Road Underpass: No More Detours Across the Railway

Basic information

This piece is about a road. Its story has two halves: one is engineering — at last the two sides of the railway are connected; the other is people — a group of families moved house for it.

First, this road's curriculum vitae

Xizang North Road is a road that has "lived a long time". There are a few key points on its timeline:

Before 1999, if you went north along this road you came to a dead stop at the railway.

The railway: a "seam" across Zhabei's body

The Shanghai–Nanjing Railway opened in 1908, and the Shanghai North Station (the old North Station) was built beside it. For Zhabei this railway was a lifeline — the station brought trade to the wharves, light to the hotels, machines to the factories.

But it was also a "seam".

The railway runs from west to east across the district, dividing Zhabei into two worlds, "south of the railway" and "north of the railway": to the south is the Beizhan and Tianmu Road area, the heart of old Zhabei; to the north are Zhijiang West Road, Baoshan Road, and Pengpu further up — where more and more people lived.

South of the railway is the station, north of it are homes. Yet the flood of people crossing this "seam" every day could only squeeze through a limited few crossings. Everyone living on either side knew: a detour was the everyday, a direct crossing a luxury.

(This "seam" recurs throughout the book: it cuts Beizhan Subdistrict in two, and it defines the southern boundary of Zhijiang West Road Subdistrict — south of the railway is the urban quarter "born of the railway station", and north of it is the place where a generation of railway people, those of the locomotive depot, made their homes.)

1998–1999: "threading" the road through

In June 1998 work began on the Xizang North Road underpass.

What the works involved can be put in one sentence: to take Xizang North Road underground through Tianmu Middle Road and the Shanghai–Nanjing Railway. But behind that sentence lie fourteen months of construction without a single interruption to railway operation — the railway could not stop, and the road had to be dug down.

At the end of August 1999 the underpass was completed and opened.

From that day "crossing the railway" stopped being a problem on Xizang North Road: cars passed directly beneath the railway, and the trains ran back and forth on the tracks above as usual, neither giving way to the other.

In today's language this is called "breaking a transport bottleneck"; in the language of the residents along the road at the time it was just five words: no more detours.

One underpass, and a migration of people

On the drawings the underpass was a line; on the ground it meant a row of houses along the route would have to be cleared.

One such patch was Juxicun, the railway workers' quarters beside the Shanghai Railway Locomotive Depot. Those who lived there were mostly railway workers' families: the father repaired engines at the locomotive depot, the mother worked in a railway-related unit, and the children grew up in this neighbourhood. They knew the sounds of the railway too well — so well that they could not hear them.

The underpass needed this ground, and a group of Juxicun families said goodbye to their old houses. Many of them settled their new homes in Pengpu Xincun.

This was no isolated move. In the 1990s Pengpu Xincun took on the rehousing of a great many demolished households from Zhabei and from Shanghai's central city — the development of Bunye Cheng, the Chengdu Road elevated road, the Mingzhu line … Households cleared by one project after another gradually put down roots here. (Even earlier, from 1985, households cleared for the new railway passenger station and other projects were rehoused here — more than 4,500 households, more than 13,000 people in all.)

And so you get a picture like this: a group of railway workers' families moved from Juxicun beside the railway to Pengpu Xincun, far away north of the railway — and in this way the two ends of Zhabei were joined up, family by family.

Later, some of those children would tell people: when I was small I lived near the locomotive depot, and then we moved to Pengpu. The listener would not necessarily know that what lies between those two clauses is precisely an underpass.

After it opened

The opening of the underpass was only a beginning.

• in December 2000 Xizang North Road (the Zhongshan North Road–Liuying Road stretch) was broken through — this old road, of which only the southern section had been built in 1898, at last had a complete course running from Suzhou Creek straight to the north of the district;
• later, Metro Line 8 set up Zhongxing Road station and Qufu Road station along Xizang North Road — the problem of "crossing the railway" of those years no longer even needs the action of "crossing": the metro simply goes under;
• the look of the route changed too: cross the bridge at the southern end and you are at the Suhe Bay stretch of Sihang Warehouse, the middle section is the sound of recitation from Shibei Middle School, and the northern section meets the new neighbourhoods towards Daning.

An underpass built so that people would not have to "detour" ended up growing into the backbone of a road.

What to see here today

• take a ride through the underpass once: from the Xizang Road Bridge go north, pass Tianmu Middle Road and enter the underpass, and a few dozen seconds later come out on the north side of the railway — it is hard to imagine that this "seam" once trapped several generations;
• stand a while beside the railway: near the northern portal of the underpass you can find a spot to watch the railway, and see trains coming into and out of Shanghai Railway Station over your head;
• how to read it alongside others: this underpass is the key to understanding "north and south of the railway" — it is worth reading together with the three pieces on Shanghai Railway Station, the Shanghai Railway Locomotive Depot and Zhijiang West Road Subdistrict;
• one warning: the underpass is an urban arterial road with heavy traffic, so do not walk or linger in the carriageway — if you want to look slowly, use the pavements on either side.

Connections

• Sub-district：Zhijiang West Road Subdistrict
• See also：Shanghai Railway Station, Shanghai Railway Locomotive Depot, Zhijiang West Road Subdistrict, Pengpu Xincun Subdistrict

Sources: the building of Xizang North Road and its lineage (first built in 1898 and originally called North Xizang Road, renamed in 1943, widened to Tianmu Middle Road in 1953), the start of work and the opening of the underpass (June 1998 / the end of August 1999), the breaking through of the Zhongshan North Road–Liuying Road stretch in December 2000, and its running beneath Tianmu Middle Road and the Shanghai–Nanjing Railway follow the Shanghai Place-Name Gazetteer (Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences Press), the Gazetteer of Zhabei District, Shanghai (1994–2005) and the Wikipedia entry "Xizang North Road" (cross-checked against several sources, Grade B); the positions of Zhongxing Road station and Qufu Road station on Metro Line 8 follow public Shanghai metro material (Grade B); that from 1985 Pengpu Xincun rehoused more than 4,500 households and more than 13,000 people cleared for the new railway passenger station and other projects, and from 1993 took in households cleared for Bunye Cheng, the Chengdu Road elevated road and the Mingzhu line, follow the public lineage material of Pengpu Xincun Subdistrict and reports such as Securities Times's "A Survey of Original-Site Demolition and Rebuilding of Shanghai's Old Small Flats" (Grade B); the passage on the group of railway workers' families from Juxicun by the locomotive depot who were cleared for the underpass and moved to Pengpu Xincun rests on the author's family memory (personal reminiscence, Grade C). The full bibliography is in Appendix 4.