BEIJING: The Shanghai-Chongqing-Chengdu high-speed rail (HSR), which will link a number of urban clusters along China’s longest river – the Yangtze – and benefit some 600 million people, got a boost on Tuesday as its builder began laying tracks along a key section.
Builders from state-owned China Railway No 4 Engineering Group Co Ltd (CREC4) began laying 500-m-long ballast-free tracks on the Wuhan-Yichang section, which is part of the 2,100-km HSR costing some 600 billion yuan.
They laid the tracks at the construction site of Jingmen West Railway Station, along the 315.5-km Wuhan-Yichang section, in the prefecture-level city of Jingmen, Hubei province.
Li Yi, work safety supervisor for the CREC4 management department of the project, said the entire line – which runs parallel with the Yangtze and links six provincial-level regions of Shanghai, Jiangsu, Anhui, Hubei, Chongqing and Sichuan – is being built and put into operation section by section, and is expected to be fully operational by 2030.
Li said the Wuhan-Yichang section –which launched construction in September 2021 with a total investment of some 52.27 billion yuan – will be open to traffic by June next year.
Upon its opening, it can allow travellers from Wuhan, capital of Central China’s Hubei, to reach Shanghai in the east or Chongqing in the south-west within three hours.
This will fully boost the transport of passengers and cargo along the line, he said. — China Daily/ANN
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