On April 15, at the intersection of Xunfu Road and Tanzhou Avenue in Changsha, final commissioning work before shield tunneling was underway at Xunfu Road Station on the Phase I project of the Chang-Zhu-Tan Intercity Rail Transit West Ring Line. According to Wang Tongfu, head of shield tunneling construction for the Xuexun section of China Railway 11th Bureau, the shield-tunneled Xuexun section is 3.3 kilometers long. After nearly half a month of hoisting and commissioning, the first bidirectional shield on the West Ring Line is about to be launched, and the shield tunneling task for this section is expected to be completed before the end of the year.
The Phase I project of the Chang-Zhu-Tan Intercity Rail Transit West Ring Line is the "one rail" among the "three trunk roads and two rails" of Chang-Zhu-Tan integration. The project starts from Xiangtan North Station and runs from south to north along Tanzhou Avenue through Xiangtan Jiuhua and the Pingpu cluster of the Xiangjiang New Area to Shantang Station, the starting station of Phase I of Line 3. It has a total length of 17.29 kilometers, including 7.36 kilometers of underground section. As an important part of Chang-Zhu-Tan urban integration, the project is expected to be put into operation by the end of 2023, when Changsha residents will be able to take the subway directly to Xiangtan.