On January 7, the first high-speed railway in the 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, a CPG500 track-laying machine of China Railway 14th Bureau Group 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 Group, as the contractor for main-line track laying on the Tongliao-Xinmin North high-speed railway, used two of the most advanced CPG500 direct track-laying machines in China with independent intellectual property rights; for fine adjustment and alignment of the track, large track maintenance machinery was deployed for parallel operations to ensure work quality and smooth progress of track laying.

　　The Inner Mongolia Tongliao to Liaoning Xinmin North high-speed railway began 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. By connecting with the Beijing-Shenyang high-speed railway under construction, it will feed into the high-speed rail network of Northeast China and the whole country. The line starts from Xinmin North Station on the Beijing-Shenyang HSR, passes through Zhangwu and Ganqika, and leads into 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 the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region.