On March 12, good news came from the Guangxi section of the newly built Huangtong (Guizhou) to Baise (Guangxi) Railway (hereinafter referred to as the "Huang-Bai Railway"), a landmark project of the New Western Land-Sea Corridor: the main tunnel excavation of two long tunnels, the Leye Tunnel and the Laoshan Tunnel, has cumulatively surpassed the 5,000-meter mark, marking a new level in the project's tunnel construction and laying a solid foundation for the line to be completed and opened to traffic on schedule.

The Leye Tunnel has a total length of 7,042 meters and is located in strata of mudstone interbedded with sandstone and sandstone interbedded with mudstone. Its entrance is adjacent to the Lebai Expressway, and its exit is close to a residential area, resulting in complex construction conditions and high safety risks. The Laoshan Tunnel has a total length of 9,121 meters. A large landslide body exists at its entrance, the geological stability is poor, and the middle section is rich in groundwater with densely populated areas along the route, so settlement and environmental impact must be strictly controlled during construction.

Faced with multiple challenges, the Yungui Railway Guangxi Company and the Huang-Bai Railway Company organized units including China Railway Eryuan Engineering Group and China Railway No. 5 Engineering Group to continuously optimize the design and construction plans based on on-site geological conditions and the construction environment, adopting a construction method combining the benching method and the full-face method to ensure both construction safety and efficiency. Especially in the construction of the Laoshan Tunnel, the project team introduced complete sets of mechanized equipment such as double-folding-boom drilling jumbos, wet-spraying manipulators, self-propelled hydraulic invert trestles, and intelligent digital lining trolleys, greatly reducing work intensity and manpower, and increasing overall operational efficiency by 30%, achieving the construction goal of "replacing workers with machinery, reducing personnel with automation, and improving quality with intelligence."

Up to now, the main tunnel excavation of the Guangxi section of the Huang-Bai Railway has exceeded 60,200 meters, 3,241 bridge pile foundations have been completed, 411 bridge piers have been built, and more than 4.76 million cubic meters of subgrade earth and rock work has been completed. Once the project is completed, it will further improve the regional road network layout and become a convenient channel connecting northern Guizhou with the Beibu Gulf Port of Guangxi, which is of great significance for promoting the construction of the New Western Land-Sea Corridor and advancing the economic and social development of the Baise old revolutionary base area and the ethnic regions along the route.

(Baise Converged Media)