苏州桐泾路作为横亘在城区十多年之久的“断头路”，堪称世界施工建设史上大盾构穿越运营高铁的“最难案例”，日前该难题终于被攻克，预计明年建成通车，届时将大大缓解虎丘路、广济路的交通压力。
Suzhou’s Tongjing Road is known as a “super dead end” among local residents. The extension project to open up Tongjing Road was put on the agenda as early as 13 years ago, but its detailed construction plan had remained an unresolved issue.
The two-kilometer-long road has to pass through two railways and the Shantang Historic Cultural Block, a national 4A-level tourist attraction. For the sake of landscape preservation, experts didn’t adopt the plan of building an elevated road.
On October 26, 2020, the “Gusu” shield tunneling machine started turning and the dead end, which has been put on ice for over ten years, began its journey to break through.
The most difficult part of the construction project is how to tunnel through both Shanghai-Nanjing Intercity Railway and Beijing-Shanghai High-speed Railway without suspending their regular operation.The Shanghai-Nanjing Intercity Railway has a maximum design speed of 350 kilometers per hour and there is a bullet train whizzing past every three minutes.
After more than a year of experiments, China Railway Fifth Survey and Design Institute Group Co., Ltd. developed a special pile driver that is capable of guaranteeing the safe operation of running high-speed trains. The new-type pile driver makes it possible to dig a tunnel under an operating high-speed railway, and also fills a gap in tunnel construction technologies in the world.
As the tunnel shield machine went across Shanghai-Nanjing Intercity Railway and Beijing-Shanghai High-speed Railway on January 11, 2021, the two major technological difficulties in connecting the “dead end” to Suzhou’s road network were successfully overcome.
This means that the world’s “trickiest case”, which has plagued the old town of Suzhou for over a decade, will be opened to traffic in 2022.
Upon its completion, the new road will effectively reduce the driving distance by two to five kilometers and the driving time by 15 to 20 minutes. Meanwhile, it will fully lighten the traffic burden on Huqiu Road and Guangji Road.
