At 3 a.m. on the 31st, the main line rotating bridge on Changqing Road in Wuhan took 103 minutes to rotate 81 degrees clockwise, crossing 9 tracks in the western throat area of Hankou Railway Station and achieving precise closure with the approach bridge. This is China's first extremely unbalanced rotating bridge, setting three new world records for rotating bridges: the most unbalanced rotation, the widest rotating bridge deck, and the most railway tracks crossed.
The rotating bridge is a controlling project of the Changqing Road section of the Hanjiang Avenue in Wuhan, designed by China Railway Wuhan Survey and Design Institute and constructed by the Second Company of China Railway 11th Bureau Group. Once open to traffic, it will provide a rapid connection between the city's Second Ring Road and Third Ring Road, greatly alleviating traffic congestion in the Hankou Railway Station area.
According to Xiao Yusong, the bridge design director, the project faced many challenges during construction: the mainline viaduct crossing the railway section had to cross 9 railway lines including the Beijing-Guangzhou Hankou connecting line and Shanghai-Chengdu line at the western throat of Hankou Railway Station, which is rare in the world; the bridge uses the rotating construction method, which conventionally requires extensive demolition in the city center; the rotation lengths at both ends of the bridge differ greatly, making it difficult to solve the rotation balance problem with conventional methods.
"Hankou Railway Station has nearly 600 trains passing through every day. To reduce interference with existing lines during bridge construction and ensure railway operation safety, we can only build the bridge body parallel to the railway direction first, and then rotate the completed bridge body clockwise to the design position," said Guo Zhaoying, project chief engineer of the Second Company of China Railway 11th Bureau Group. The superstructure of the bridge is a separated steel box girder, with a total rotation length of 135.2 meters, a total deck width of 51 meters, and a rotation weight of 8,800 tons. The long arm end is 91.4 meters long, and the short arm end is 43.8 meters long. The length difference between the two ends is more than two times, and the weight difference between the two arms is 3,600 tons. It is currently the world's most unbalanced rotating bridge, with the widest rotating bridge deck and the most railway tracks crossed.
To solve many world-class construction challenges such as the stability and balance control of the left and right bridge decks, transverse deformation control of the bridge deck, rotation process control, and safety risks during construction, China Railway 11th Bureau Group invited senior experts, scholars, and industry elites to conduct on-site scheme demonstration and review; actively implemented technological innovation, pioneering the "rack and pinion" rotation method, using a track beam to assist the front support rotation method; produced a 1:5 scale physical model according to the actual size of the bridge to verify and improve the construction scheme, mastered multiple key construction technologies under extremely unbalanced conditions, and ultimately achieved the successful rotation of the bridge.