First Navigation Span of World’s Longest Cross-Sea Railway Bridge Joined

Dragon Media Newsroom

The steel structure of the southern navigation-channel bridge on China’s Hangzhou Bay Cross-Sea Railway Bridge was joined on Saturday. It is the first of the project’s three navigation-channel bridges to reach this construction milestone.

The 29.2-kilometre bridge is a key structure on the Nantong–Ningbo high-speed railway. Once completed, trains on the line are expected to travel at up to 350 kilometres per hour. Chinese media have described it as the world’s longest cross-sea high-speed railway bridge under construction.

The southern navigation-channel bridge is 814.5 metres long, with a 364-metre main span designed to allow vessels of up to 3,000 tonnes to pass. With the span joined, construction teams will proceed with cable tensioning, bridge-deck construction and conversion to the permanent structural system.

Construction has been challenging because of strong tides and currents, high winds and changes to the seabed, project information said. To maintain precision and safety, crews used a double-sided incremental launching method to join the steel structure. They also used the BeiDou Navigation Satellite System and digital monitoring to continuously track structural stress, cable forces and displacement.

The 301-kilometre Nantong–Ningbo railway is expected to improve rail connections between coastal cities in Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces and expand the rail network in the Yangtze River Delta region.