The Shanghai-Suzhou-Nantong Railway, jointly built by several subsidiaries of CREC, was inaugurated on the morning of July 1. Starting from Nantong in Jiangsu Province in the north, the railway goes southward, crosses the Yangtze River via the Shanghai-Suzhou-Nantong Yangtze River Bridge and arrives in Shanghai. The total length is 143 kilometers and the designed top speed is 200 kilometers per hour.
Designed by China Railway Major Bridge Reconnaissance & Design Institute Co., Ltd. and constructed by China Railway Major Bridge Engineering Group Co., Ltd., the Shanghai-Suzhou-Nantong Yangtze River Bridge runs a total length of 11,072 meters. The section for both the highway and the railway measures 5,827 meters in length. The 1,092-meter steel truss cable-stayed bridge over the main navigation channel is the first cable-stayed bridge for both highway and railway with a length surpassing 1,000 meters in the world.
Over the six years of its construction, the designing and construction companies were granted with more than 30 patents, including over 20 invention patents. The open caisson foundation of the bridge, the largest underwater foundation in the world, measures 86.9 meters in length, 58.7 meters in width and some 110 meters in height. The cable tower, the key load-bearing structure for the bridge, is 330 meters in height and is the highest main tower for a dual-use bridge in the world. The pressures the steel beams and cables can handle reach 500 MPa and 2,000 MPa, respectively, both representing a high level across the globe.
Concrete pouring for the cushion cap of the No. 28 main tower pillar began in September 2016.
In the future, the Shanghai-Suzhou-Nantong Yangtze River Bridge will be built into an intelligent bridge, providing users with 5G services including high-speed WiFi access, high-quality voice calls and VR/AR.
(Source: China Railway Major Bridge Reconnaissance & Design Institute Co., Ltd. and China Railway Major Bridge Engineering Group Co., Ltd.)
