On the morning of October 12, the right tube of the Luhongshan Tunnel, a key control project of the Luhongshan (Hunan-Hubei border) to Cili Expressway invested and built by China Railway Communications Investment Group Co., Ltd. and constructed with the participation of China Railway Sixth Group Co., Ltd., was successfully holed through.

The Lu-Ci Expressway is part of the Hunan section of the national key project G59 Hubei-Hunan Expressway, with a total length of about 79 kilometers. The Luhongshan Tunnel is the starting point of the Lu-Ci Expressway, with its entrance and exit located in Wufeng Tujia Autonomous County of Hubei Province and Shimen County of Hunan Province respectively. It is an extra-long tunnel running through Luhongshan at the Hunan-Hubei provincial border, with a total length of 4,445 meters, of which 2,482 meters lie within Hunan. The tunnel adopts a separated twin-tube structure, with a maximum burial depth of about 670 meters, a tube width of 10.5 meters and a height of 5 meters, a design speed of 80 km/h, and two-way four-lane traffic.

The Luhongshan Tunnel is located in a typical karst development area, with various adverse geological conditions such as gas and karst, and it is excavated from a single end, putting great pressure on construction safety. Under complex geological conditions, the construction party adopted four "in-place" measures—pre-control in place to ensure safety, plans in place to ensure efficiency, assessments in place to ensure quality, and emergency response in place to ensure safety—to ensure the tunnel was holed through smoothly and on schedule. The engineering personnel adhered to "one ventilation" (ventilation), "three preventions" (dust prevention, gas prevention, and fire prevention), "five systems" (tunnel access control system, escape system, video monitoring system, emergency rescue telephone system, and personnel positioning system), and "six key links" (manual plus automatic gas detection, ventilation, hot work approval, ventilation stoppage approval, three checks per blast, and the three-person interlocking blasting mechanism), preventing excessive gas concentration and the generation of ignition sources, and ensuring safe and controllable tunnel excavation and driving. The company earnestly implemented relevant specification requirements to ensure that construction quality met design specification requirements.

The Lu-Ci Expressway is expected to be completed and opened to traffic in June 2025. After opening, the project will connect well-known tourist attractions such as the Three Gorges of the Yangtze River, Huping Mountain, and Zhangjiajie, becoming a convenient tourism corridor and playing a significant role in strengthening communication and exchanges between Hunan and Hubei provinces and promoting the economic and social development of northwestern Hunan.