On March 18, accompanied by the roar of the TBM boring machine cutting through the mountain, the left and right main tunnels at the exit end of the Tianshan Shengli Tunnel on the Urumqi-Yuli Expressway, located deep in the Tianshan Mountains in Hejing County, Xinjiang, reached 1,000 meters of excavation, and the service tunnel's TBM excavation surpassed the 1,500-meter mark, marking that tunnel construction has entered a full speed-up phase.

The Tianshan Shengli Tunnel is about 22 kilometers long and has an average altitude of 3,000 meters. As a controlling project of the Urumqi-Yuli Expressway, it has complex geological conditions, high construction difficulty, and high safety risks.

In response to the "characteristics" of the Tianshan Shengli Tunnel, the project has tailored a "three-tunnel" construction plan. The service tunnel adopts the TBM method to assist main tunnel construction, the first application of its kind in a domestic expressway tunnel. The two main tunnels are constructed by the drill-and-blast method. By leveraging the advantages of rapid TBM excavation in the service tunnel and opening auxiliary working faces in the main tunnels, the entire tunnel is "cut" into sections, thereby achieving ultra-short construction of a long tunnel and saving about 20 months of construction time compared with traditional inclined-shaft auxiliary construction.

At present, the TBM boring machines at both the entrance and exit ends of the Tianshan Shengli Tunnel are working at an average excavation speed of 20 meters per day, and will "meet" in the tunnel in the future to complete the full breakthrough of the tunnel.