Great Wall to get deepest high-speed rail station

BEIJING: Chinese workers are building the world’s deepest and Asia’s largest underground highspeed railway station beneath the Great Wall at the Badaling section in Beijing.

The station under construction will be 3-storeys high and have a 36,000 sq m floor area, including platform, entrance and exit. The railway tracks will be 102m underground.

The station is an important part of a 12.01km long tunnel section of the 174km Beijing–Zhangjiakou high-speed railway line.

The tunnel is the longest one of the railway line.

“Passengers will enter and exit the station about 100m underground, and it will be very safe,” said Dai Longzhen, a senior manager of the construction company China Railway No. 5 Engineering Group Co Ltd.

An escalator would raise passengers 62m at vertical height, and inclined elevators will also be used in the station for the first time.

To secure the safety of passengers, the station will change the inclined shafts that are used to build the station as permanent rescue channels.

The underground burrowing work is the country’s most complicated, because the station has to contain 78 caverns and lots of intersections, said Chen Bin, a commander-in-chief of the project.

Starting from the construction of the tunnel on April 15, 2016, workers are aware of how tough the work will be, though the hardness of the rocks still exceeded their expectations, said Jiang Si, a manager of the company.

According to its initial plan, workers would excavate the tunnel 6m to 8m a day, but the tough rock meant workers could dig only about 2m a day.

Large–size shield tunneling machines could not be used, and workers could only use blasting methods, Dai said.

Workers have to develop new blasting techniques to explore the tunnel carefully, because just above it are the Great Wall and the railway line linking Beijing and Zhangjiakou designed and built 100 years ago.

The Bejing-Zhangjiakou highspeed railway is expected to get through by the end of 2019, allowing passengers to travel between the two cities in one hour. — China Daily/Asia News Network