On November 4, 2026, the main pier of the newly built Wenfu High speed Railway Minjiang Extra Large Bridge in the water was officially drilled, and the bridge fully entered the construction stage of the main structure in the water.

Close range cross river construction challenges industry limits

The Minjiang Extra Large Bridge is a controlled project for the newly built Wenfu High speed Railway, with a total length of 2890 meters and 55 piers and abutments. It spans the Minjiang River continuously and 22 existing railway, highway, municipal road, subway and other facilities. The main tower is 46 meters high. The main bridge adopts a three span continuous beam system partially cable-stayed bridge design, with a span arrangement of 147 meters+288 meters+147 meters, which is currently the leading span project among similar railway bridges in China.

The bridge is adjacent to the operating Fuzhou Xiamen high-speed railway, with a minimum distance of only 8.1 meters between the two railways. The main pier in the water is located in the second level waterway of the Minjiang River, with busy navigation and variable water levels. Sixteen drilled piles with a diameter of 3 meters and a pile length of 58.5 meters need to be drilled through granite with a compressive strength of 308 megapascals. The construction difficulty and safety risks are both high. The construction team adopts a tower beam consolidation and tower pier separation force scheme, equipped with temporary steel wharf facilities, and uses high-power drilling machines to ensure the quality of hole formation. The pile foundation adopts a separated hole construction process, controlling the net distance between adjacent pile holes to be no less than 5 meters, minimizing construction vibration, and ensuring the safety of existing high-speed railway operations.

Environmental protection construction protects the ecology of the Minjiang River water area

The project implements the strictest water environmental protection control standards throughout the entire process. During the construction process, all mud and drilling slag are pumped into a dedicated box through a mud pump, and after sedimentation and drying, they are transported and centrally disposed of, completely avoiding direct entry of drilling slag into the river. The underwater pier is constructed using a fully enclosed steel cofferdam, and all core processes are completed inside the cofferdam, greatly reducing the disturbance of the operation on the Minjiang River water body. At the same time, a dedicated person is arranged to regularly monitor the water quality and dynamically grasp changes in the water environment indicators. Keywords: railway transportation, high-speed rail

The newly-built Wenfu high-speed railway is an important component of the coastal passage of China's eight vertical and eight horizontal high-speed railway network, with a total length of about 303 kilometers and a designed speed of 350 kilometers per hour. After the completion of the project, it will form a higher standard Ningbo Guangzhou high-speed railway corridor together with the already opened Fuzhou Xiamen high-speed railway, Guangzhou Shantou high-speed railway, Shantou Shantou high-speed railway, the under construction Zhangshan high-speed railway, and the planned Ningbo Wenzhou high-speed railway, further compressing the spatial and temporal distance between cities along the southeast coast and strengthening the rapid interconnection between the Yangtze River Delta and the Guangdong Hong Kong Macao Greater Bay Area.Editor/Cheng Liting