On June 11, 2026, the construction of the Changsha-Ganzhou High-Speed Railway achieved a key breakthrough: the underwater works of the Changsha Xiangjiang Railway Grand Bridge have been basically completed, and the project has fully shifted to the elevated ground construction phase. For this cable-stayed bridge with a 768.1-meter-long main span, the completion of the underwater section means that the most difficult "underwater operation" of the entire Changsha-Ganzhou High-Speed Railway has been successfully overcome. You may not know that the construction difficulty of this bridge has been described by the industry as "hell-level": the granite strength at the bridge site is as high as 180 MPa, the rock surface is inclined and undulating, and the horizontal distance between the center of the left line and the center of the existing Shichang Railway second line is only 33.67 meters. Under such conditions, the pile foundations of the main piers were completed 44 days ahead of schedule, which can be called an engineering miracle. The main bridge of the Changsha Xiangjiang Railway Grand Bridge is 768.1 meters long in total and adopts a cable-stayed bridge scheme to cross the main navigation channel of the right branch of the Xiangjiang River. It is the most important node project in the Wangcheng section of the Changsha-Ganzhou High-Speed Railway. As of June 11, of the 5,102 designed pile foundations for the bridge project, 1,238 have been completed; of the 561 designed pile caps, 75 have been completed; and of the 561 designed pier shafts, 54 have been completed. The pile foundations of the main piers have all been completed, with only 6 pile foundations remaining unfinished for the side piers and auxiliary piers, and the construction contractor is concentrating its efforts on advancing the trench milling construction for the main pier cofferdams.

To tackle this "hard nut," the project team specially customized a rotary drilling rig with short drill pipes, innovatively adopted a four-stage reaming process, and implemented the "three-self" management model of "self-owned equipment, self-managed teams, and self-controlled production." During construction, the team used a combined process of double barges, rotary drilling rigs, crawler cranes, and hydraulic vibratory hammers, and applied an intelligent informatization monitoring system to achieve intelligent collection of construction data and high-precision real-time monitoring. More notably, the site also installed a train warning system, a laser radar electronic barrier, and a deformation monitoring system for the existing railway line to ensure construction safety in close proximity to the operating railway.

Looking at the entire line, construction of the Changsha-Ganzhou High-Speed Railway is progressing at multiple points. Just a few days earlier, on May 27, all pile foundations for the main piers of the Ganjiang Railway Grand Bridge in the Jiangxi section were also completed and poured. This bridge, with a main span of 300 meters, is only 63 meters away from the already-open Ganjiang Grand Bridge of the Nanchang-Ganzhou High-Speed Railway, and in the future the two will form an urban landmark landscape of "two rainbows lying across the waves." The simultaneous breakthroughs of the two major river-crossing bridges mean that this high-speed railway artery, designed for a speed of 350 kilometers per hour with a main line length of 429.4 kilometers, has already moved from drawings to real reinforced concrete across the lands of Hunan and Jiangxi.

The Changsha-Ganzhou High-Speed Railway has an extremely high bridge-tunnel ratio along the entire line, with the Jiangxi section reaching as high as 88.24 percent. This means that for every 100 kilometers traveled, 88 kilometers run through bridges and tunnels, and the entire line requires the construction of 273 new bridges and 117 tunnels. At present, the longest tunnel on the entire line, the Jinggangshan Tunnel, with a total length of 14.116 kilometers, has maintained a stable monthly excavation speed of 150 meters since entering main construction in February, and is currently passing through the hinterland of the Luoxiao Mountains, where karst, underground rivers, and rock bursts occur frequently. The Huanghua Airport West Tunnel in the Hunan section is about 3,290 meters long and passes beneath the core area of Changsha Huanghua Airport. Advanced pipe-roof construction beneath the airport is expected to start at the end of June.