The tunneling of the Tianshan Shengli Tunnel, the world's longest expressway tunnel, was completed Monday morning through the snow-covered mountains of the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region.
As a crucial section of the Urumqi-Yuli Expressway, the new tunnel with a total length of 22.13km will traverse the Tianshan Mountains — one of the longest mountain ranges in the world and open a new pathway to southern Xinjiang. The construction of the tunnel started in April 2024.
When opened to traffic in 2025, it will cut travel time through the Tianshan Mountains from three hours to about 20 minutes, and the journey from the regional capital of Urumqi to Korla, a major city in southern Xinjiang, will be shortened from more than seven hours to about three hours.
The construction team had to overcome many difficulties and be innovative in constructing the tunnel, which is in a high-plateau area with complicated geological conditions.
The tunnel adopts the construction scheme of three drifts and four shafts. Two specially designed tunnel boring machines have been used in the construction of the middle drift to create a working platform for tunneling.
It's the first time that a tunnel boring machine was used to construct a road tunnel in China, making a technical breakthrough. The use of new technologies has cut the construction time of the tunnel from 10 years by using the traditional drilling method to just more than four years.
