Builders from China Railway No.4 Engineering Group Co., Ltd. (CREC4), undertaking the construction of Chongzuo-Pingxiang Railway in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, have dug through the first top-level high-risk karst tunnel on the railway line. Pingxiang is a county-level city under prefecture-level city of Chongzuo.
CREC4 constructors fully connected the Huashan (Flower Mountain) Tunnel on July 3 on the line, which is an extension of the existing railway linking Chongzuo with regional capital of Nanning and was invested by Guangxi Communications Investment Group Corporation Ltd.
As the third self-invested high-speed railway in Guangxi, the Chongzuo-Pingxiang Railway starts in the east from Jiangzhou District under Chongzuo, and after traversing Chongzuo’s Ningming and Longzhou counties in the west, ends at Pingxiang City, a border port city between China and Vietnam. The railway can also be extended to Vietnam in the long run if conditions are allowed.
Located in the No 2 Bid of Chongzuo-Pingxiang Railway, the Huashan Tunnel is a Class-I high-risk karst tunnel, which is 4,206 meters long and has a maximum burial depth of 225 meters, making it a key control project for the entire line. With complex geological conditions inside, the tunnel provides the CREC4 builders with experiences in digging super-large karst caves in the future.
With four stations —Chongzuo South, Ningming East, Longzhou, and Pingxiang East — on the 81.52-kilometer line, 85.63 percent of Chongzuo-Pingxiang Railway will be railway bridges and tunnels.
Upon operation, Nanning and Pingxiang can be connected fully by a high-speed railway, and the western end of the entire line can link with Vietnam’s Dongdang-Hanoi Railway via the Hunan-Guangxi Railway which connects Hunan’s Hengyang with the Friendship Pass in Pingxiang, providing travelers with trips to go as far as Vientiane in Laos, Bangkok in Thailand, Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia, and Singapore. Via the Nanning hub, the eastern end of Chongzuo-Pingxiang Railway can join the existing Nanning-Guangzhou Railway, Liuzhou-Nanning Intercity Railway, Nanning-Kunming High-speed Railway and the Guiyang-Nanning High-speed Railway which is under construction. All these will help largely elevate the three-dimensional transport capacity of Guangxi in linking the country’s eastern and western regions, and in connecting with ASEAN countries.