In the early hours of December 27, construction of the rotational continuous girder of the newly built Shangqiu-Hefei-Hangzhou High-Speed Railway crossing the Shanghai-Wuhan-Chengdu High-Speed Railway, a national key project undertaken by China Railway No. 4 Engineering Group, was successfully completed. This marks the overcoming of an important milestone in the construction of the Shangqiu-Hefei-Hangzhou Railway, a national key railway project.
This rotational continuous girder construction of the Shangqiu-Hefei-Hangzhou Railway crossing the Shanghai-Wuhan-Chengdu Railway is currently the only rotational continuous girder construction under way in Anhui Province for a high-speed railway crossing an existing high-speed railway line, and it is also the only rotational continuous girder construction along the entire Shangqiu-Hefei-Hangzhou Railway that crosses a high-speed railway. The rotational continuous girder construction involves rotating the pier to carry the continuous girder atop the pier body to a predetermined position, with a total rotational weight of 6,787.3 tons.
The newly built Shangqiu-Hefei-Hangzhou Railway's grand bridge crossing the Hefei-Nanjing Railway is located in Feidong County, Anhui Province, with a total bridge length of 7,782.22 m. The bridge crosses the Shanghai-Wuhan-Chengdu Railway in the form of a rotational continuous girder (single-track); this continuous girder intersects the up and down lines of the existing Shanghai-Chengdu Railway respectively, and after the rotational construction is completed, side-span closure segments and a mid-span closure segment will be set on both sides and in the middle respectively.
According to the technical director of the Fourth Company of China Railway No. 4 Engineering Group, rotational construction is a brand-new construction technique, mostly used in places with dense pedestrian and material flows at the construction site, such as high-speed railways crossing high-speed railways and high-speed railways crossing expressways. Compared with the closed-off and speed-restricted methods used in the past, rotational construction does not affect the normal operation of the line it crosses. However, its difficulty lies in the high requirements of rotational construction for technology and construction precision; the continuous girder adopts cantilever casting with a form traveler, with large concrete volume and crisscrossing longitudinal and transverse reinforcement, making vibration compaction and construction quality control extremely difficult during pouring.
The Shangqiu-Hefei-Hangzhou Railway is located within the territories of Henan, Anhui and Zhejiang provinces, with a total line length of 794.55 km. Of this, 617.94 km is newly built, with a designed target speed of 350 km/h, and it is jointly funded and built by China Railway Corporation and the three provinces of Anhui, Zhejiang and Henan. The northern end of the line connects with the Zhengzhou-Xuzhou Passenger Dedicated Line and the planned Beijing-Kowloon Passenger Dedicated Line to link with the Central Plains, Northwest and North China regions; the central section can connect with the Sichuan-Chongqing-Hubei region via the Shanghai-Wuhan-Chengdu corridor and radiate southward to the west coast of the Taiwan Strait via the under-construction Hefei-Fuzhou Railway; the southern end connects with the Nanjing-Hangzhou Passenger Dedicated Line and reaches Zhejiang Province through the Hangzhou hub.