Such a railway had long been desired by Western interests in
19th-century China and just as long opposed by the
Qing government. Following China's disastrous failure in the
First Sino-Japanese War, however, the
Songhu Railway from Shanghai was extended to Nanjing. The project was undertaken by the civil engineering partnership Sir
John Wolfe-Barry and Lt Col
Arthur John Barry at the end of the nineteenth century. Its former eastern terminus at the Old North Station in Shanghai's
Zhabei District (the former
American district of the
International Settlement) is now the
Shanghai Railway Museum. From 1928 to 1949, while Nanjing was the capital of the
Republic of China, the line was known as the
Jinghu Railway, a name now reserved for the line between
Beijing and Shanghai. In 2007 during the
Sixth Railway Speed-Up Campaign, the line was organized into the
Beijing–Shanghai railway ==See also==