China is unleashed at all levels. Beyond trains, ships and, of course, electric cars, the Asian country can boast of its technology or its infrastructure. In fact, for a few days now, in China they have had another reason for pride: the túnel Shengli de Tianshan.
It is about the longest mountain road tunnel in the world and it took less than four years to build it. Thanks to this tunnel, it will only take 20 minutes to cross Tianshan Mountain; Before it took more than three hours.
An engineering challenge that crosses a gigantic mountain range
In 2020, China launched a project to link the city of Ürümqi (one of the largest in Central Asia, with more than four million inhabitants), located in the north of the Xianjiang region, with the town of Yuli, located in the south of the same region. The objective of the project was to reduce the more than seven hours it took to get from one location to the other.
The key to this Ürümqi-Yuli highway was to drill a huge mountain range to build a tunnel that would make the journey much more direct. Well, on December 30, 2024, China completed the construction of this tunnel.
The Tianshan Shengli Tunnel, the world’s longest expressway tunnel, has completed tunneling. The 22.13-kilometer tunnel will shorten the 3-hour-long trip across the Tianshan Mountains to 20 minutes. #Xinjiang #ChinaInfrastructure pic.twitter.com/9PTjT0beDF
— Lin Jian Lin Jian (@SpoxCHN_LinJian) January 1, 2025
It is called ‘Shengli’ tunnel (in Chinese, it translates as ‘victory’), it passes through the Tianshan mountains and has a length of 22.13 kilometersmaking it the longest mountain road tunnel in the world. There are only two longer road tunnels, the WestConnex de Australia22.4 kilometers, and the Lærdal de Noruega24.51 km, but neither of them is exclusively mountainous, like Shengli.
The fact of being drilled only in a mountain range has been synonymous with all kinds of challenges, for the extreme coldthe high altitudes, the strong seismic activity and, according to Xinhuastrict environmental requirements. The mountains in which the tunnel has been built have many geological fault zones and 16 of them cross the work.
Designing and building all the tunnel ventilation has also been very complicated. One of the conduits has a depth of 706 meters. However, the tunnel was built in smaller segments than usual and, therefore, more manageable, and this allowed the excavation to be accelerated, so that the work was completed earlier than planned. More than 3,000 workers have participated in its construction.
China’s Xinjiang region completes world’s longest highway tunnel through challenging mountain range pic.twitter.com/orsqNB81Zi
— China Xinhua Español (@XHespanol) December 30, 2024
Now we have to finish the rest of the autopista at Ürümqi-Yuli. Thanks to the tunnel, a journey that previously took more than three hours by car has been reduced to 20 minutes.
The goal is to reduce the total travel time between Ürümqi and Yuli from more than seven hours by car. just over three hoursand without the risk that comes with driving on mountain roads in the middle of winter. The road is expected to be fully completed within months and open to traffic before the end of 2025.
Imagen: Xinhua/Wang Fei
Source: www.motorpasion.com
