As the last pair of 500-meter-long steel rails was smoothly laid on October 24 at the entrance of the Junlian Tunnel on the Chongqing-Kunming High-Speed Railway, track laying was completed across the entire line.
Track laying on the Chongqing-Kunming highspeed railway
The main works and the decoration of newly built station buildings for the Chongqing-Kunming railway have also been completed, and improvement of the off-rail environment and construction of the supporting projects are being accelerated.
The railway sections in different provinces will successively enter the joint commissioning and testing stages, and the whole railway is expected to open to traffic in the first half of 2027.
Passing through Chongqing Municipality, Sichuan Province, Guizhou Province and Yunnan Province, the Chongqing-Kunming railway has a total length of about 700 kilometers and a designed speed of 350 kilometers per hour.
Track laying in a tunnel of the Chongqing-Kunming highspeed railway
The entire line is being built in sections, with the Chongqing-Yibin section already opened to traffic on September 29, 2024. Once the entire line opens to traffic, the travel time from Kunming to Chongqing will be reduced to about 2.5 hours, and the Kunming-Chengdu train ride will be cut to less than 3 hours.
The railway advances from the Sichuan Basin into the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau, running through the heart of the geologically complex Wumeng Mountain area. The bridge-tunnel ratio along the line is as high as 87.4 percent, and there are as many as 10 tunnels exceeding 10 kilometers in length.
Reporting by Hu Xiaorong; Trans-editing by Wang Shixue
