On May 7, 2026, at the entrance of the North Taihang Mountain Tunnel in Wutai County, Xinzhou, Shanxi Province, with the precise positioning of the first pair of 500 meter long steel rails, the Shanxi section of the Xiongxin High speed Railway officially entered the track laying stage. This is not only the laying of a steel rail, but also a key turning point in the construction of Shanxi's first 350 kilometer per hour high-speed railway.

The Iron and Steel Long March in the hinterland of Taihang Mountains

This steel artery that crosses the land of Yan Zhao and San Jin has a total track length of 716 kilometers and requires the installation of 178 sets of turnouts. The proportion of bridges and tunnels along the entire line is as high as 88%, with 11 tunnels in the Shanxi section alone, accounting for 46.9% of the total length of the line. The difficulty of constructing bridges and tunnels in the rugged mountains lies not only in the length, but also in the terrain - there are continuous long slopes of 30 ‰ in multiple tunnel sections, which poses a great challenge to heavy rail transportation.

Intelligent technology breaks the curse of ramps

How to make the long rail train as stable as Mount Tai on a steep slope of 30 ‰? The on-site person in charge, Yang Qing, gave the answer: "For the transportation of long rail trains, we reduce the number of steel rails, increase the number of traction locomotives, and set a threshold for monitoring braking efficiency." Once this intelligent system detects an abnormality, it will automatically alarm and limit traction, effectively solving the transportation and construction problems of long slopes and ensuring millimeter level errors in track laying accuracy. Keywords: infrastructure, transportation, high-speed rail

As an important part of the national eight vertical and eight horizontal Beijing Kunming railway, the main line of the Xiongxin high-speed railway is about 342 kilometers long, starting from Xiong'an in the east and ending at Xinzhou in the west. Its completion will completely change the pattern of high-speed rail in Shanxi and inject strong power of 350 kilometers per hour into the high-quality development of the region.Editor/Cheng Liting