At 9:30 a.m. on January 13, drilling officially began for the main pier of the Ma'anshan Yangtze River Rail-Road Bridge on the Chaohu-Ma'anshan Intercity Railway. To implement the requirements of Yangtze River protection and reduce the impact of bridge construction on flood control, the ecological environment, and the Yangtze River shipping channel, the bridge adopts a three-tower, two-main-span design. Once completed, it will be a combination of super-large scale, super-large twin main spans, super-high towers, and super-large-diameter bored piles, and will set multiple world records.

The Ma'anshan Yangtze River Rail-Road Bridge is located about 2.3 kilometers upstream of the existing Ma'anshan Yangtze River Highway Bridge. The bridge was designed by China Railway Major Bridge Reconnaissance & Design Institute and is being built by China Railway Major Bridge Engineering Group. Yang Canwen, head of the Ma'anshan Rail-Road Bridge project at China Railway Major Bridge Reconnaissance & Design Institute, said: “The two main spans each exceed 1,000 meters, crossing the Niutun River beach and the main navigation channel respectively. The upper deck of the bridge is a two-way, six-lane urban expressway with a speed of 80 kilometers per hour. The lower deck carries two tracks of the Chaohu-Ma'anshan Intercity Railway, designed for a speed of 250 kilometers per hour, as well as two tracks of reserved railway built to intercity railway standards, designed for a speed of 200 kilometers per hour.”

“The Ma'anshan Yangtze River Rail-Road Bridge is a combination of super-large scale, super-large twin main spans, super-high towers, and super-large-diameter bored piles, and will set multiple world records,” said Liu Ailin, chief engineer of the project for China Railway Major Bridge Engineering Group. With a single span of 1,120 meters and a continuous twin-span length of 2,240 meters, it is the world's longest-span three-tower cable-stayed bridge; the middle tower is 345 meters high, equivalent to a 115-story building, making it the world's tallest bridge tower; the middle tower foundation uses 60 bored piles with a diameter of 4 meters, the most numerous and largest-diameter bored piles for an inland river in the world. The pile cap is 89.2 meters long and 54.7 meters wide, with a plan area of nearly 5,000 square meters, equivalent to eight standard basketball courts, making it the world's largest bridge pile foundation; the steel girder has a total length of 3,248 meters.

It is understood that the bridge project is large in scale, high in technological content, complex in construction environment, and highly difficult to build. It will use 2,100-megapascal high-strength steel wire, currently the highest-strength steel wire in the world. A series of new materials, new equipment, new processes, and new technologies, including a 10,000-ton-meter-class steel tower crane, will be applied for the first time to overcome construction challenges.

The Ma'anshan Yangtze River Rail-Road Bridge is a controlling project of the Chaohu-Ma'anshan Intercity Railway. The Chaohu-Ma'anshan Intercity Railway is an important part of the Hefei-Shanghai section of the Shanghai-Wuhan-Chengdu rapid passage in the national “eight vertical and eight horizontal” high-speed rail network, with a design speed of 350 kilometers per hour. Under the severe national epidemic situation, in order to ensure the smooth start of construction of the left-branch main bridge of the Ma'anshan Yangtze River Rail-Road Bridge, the project department of China Railway Major Bridge Engineering Group has adopted multiple preventive measures, purchased and stocked epidemic prevention supplies, carried out regular daily disinfection, and strictly conducted nucleic acid testing for personnel entering the site. At present, identity verification has been completed for all external labor personnel, and centralized quarantine has been carried out along with nucleic acid testing. After the test results are available, pre-job safety education and training will be conducted to ensure the smooth start of the project.