The roar of pile drivers and the shuttle of machinery—on the fertile land of Luhe District, the "north gate" of Jinling (Nanjing), a construction boom is surging. Recently, at the construction site of Luhe West Station on the Nanjing–Huai'an Intercity Railway, busy construction scenes could be seen everywhere: large engineering machinery operating in an orderly manner, and pile foundations being precisely poured and firmly rooted underground, marking the official full-scale commencement of the Luhe West Station building project. Luhe West Station is located in Luhe District in the north of Nanjing, within Ma'an Subdistrict southwest of the Luhe main urban area, with a highly prominent locational advantage. Its transportation is very convenient, with easy access to Ma'an Airport, Nanjing Railway Station and other destinations. A reporter at the construction site observed that construction personnel were carrying out their respective duties, making every effort to advance pile foundation construction and other fundamental key processes.

The overall project rendering publicly displayed at the site "spoils" what Luhe West Station will look like: the newly built Luhe West Station is simple and grand, with an overall form that is expansive and transparent and lines that are crisp, combining the aesthetic beauty of modern architecture with the grandeur and steadiness of a transportation building, in keeping with the urban character of the Jiangbei New Town. Once completed, it will become a brand-new landmark in the southwest of the Luhe main urban area. Unlike the dense underground parking spaces of traditional high-speed railway stations, the Luhe West Station hub adopts an innovative layout of park-style green space parking in front of the station, abandoning the conventional underground parking lot design and integrating the parking area as a whole into the ecological green space in front of the station.

In the future, passenger vehicles and pick-up/drop-off vehicles will be able to park in an orderly manner within the open green plaza surrounded by greenery, achieving a deep integration of transportation functions and landscape ecology and creating a high-appearance modern transportation hub where "the station is in the park and the roads are in the greenery," transforming the crowded and stuffy environment of traditional high-speed railway stations.

A relevant person in charge of the Lot 3 project of the Luhe West Station building of the Nanjing–Huai'an Intercity Railway introduced that the station's overall functional layout is scientific and reasonable, designed as a modern line-side lower-type station building. The total building area of the station building is 9,912.23 square meters; the main structure is one story above ground, with partial two-story structures added on both sides and a partial one-story basement, and the total building height reaches 22.2 meters. The station yard has a scale of 4 platforms and 10 tracks, serving the Shanghai–Chongqing–Chengdu High-Speed Railway and the Nanjing–Huai'an Intercity Railway, among others. The station yard building area is 17,998 square meters, and two high-standard passenger entrance and exit passages, each 8 meters wide, are also built as supporting facilities, with a passage building area of 1,646.5 square meters, capable of efficiently handling passenger flow distribution and fully meeting various travel needs such as passenger passage, waiting and transfers in the long term.

The full-scale commencement of Luhe West Station this time is an important milestone in the construction of the Nanjing–Huai'an Intercity Railway. As a core component of the Yangtze River Delta intercity rail transit network, the Nanjing–Huai'an Intercity Railway has a total length of about 179 kilometers and a designed maximum speed of 350 kilometers per hour, serving as a golden corridor for northern Jiangsu to connect with Nanjing and integrate into the Yangtze River Delta. The entire line links six stations—Huai'an East, Hongze, Jinhu, Tianchang, Luhe West and Nanjing North. Once completed, it will connect multiple key provincial railway lines such as the Xuzhou–Yancheng High-Speed Railway and the Lianyungang–Zhenjiang High-Speed Railway, opening up a rapid channel for northern Jiangsu cities such as Lianyungang, Huai'an, Yancheng and Suqian to reach Nanjing directly, realizing a one-hour transportation circle from Huai'an to Nanjing and greatly compressing the time-space distance between north and south.

Source: Jiangnan Times