On January 7, the first high-speed railway in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region connecting to Northeast China—the Inner Mongolia Tongliao to Liaoning Xinmin North High-Speed Railway—officially entered the track laying phase. On the morning of January 7 at Zhangwu Station, China Railway 14th Bureau's CPG500 track laying machine smoothly laid the first pair of 500-meter long rails onto the sleepers, kicking off the track laying work.
It is understood that China Railway 14th Bureau, as the main line track laying construction unit for the Tongliao-Xinmin North HSR, used two of the most advanced CPG500 direct track laying machines with independent intellectual property rights; for track fine adjustment and smoothing, large-scale track maintenance machinery was deployed for parallel operations to ensure work quality and guarantee smooth track laying.
The Tongliao-Xinmin North HSR commenced construction in June 2016 and is part of the "Eight Horizontal and Eight Vertical" high-speed railway network in the national medium- and long-term railway network plan. It will connect with the under-construction Beijing-Shenyang HSR and integrate into the high-speed rail network of Northeast China and the whole country. The line starts from Xinmin North Station of the Beijing-Shenyang HSR, passes through Zhangwu and Ganqika, and leads to Tongliao Station, with a total length of 197 kilometers and a design speed of 250 kilometers per hour. After completion and opening to traffic, the travel time from Tongliao to Shenyang will be shortened from 5 hours to about 1.5 hours, and from Tongliao to Beijing from 14 hours to about 3.5 hours, which will play an important role in promoting economic development in the eastern part of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region.