The Yiwan railway, which spans from Yichang, Hubei Province to Wanzhou, Chongqin, known as “The Top Hard Construction Railway of the World,� was officially opened on December 22, 2010.
The success owes a lot to the core patent technology of independent R&D. Railway mapping reveals that the working sections of Yiwan railway are mostly located in the Karst mountainous area. Construction took 7 years, and the length of bridges and tunnels alone span an estimated 278km to 377km, accounting for 74% of the entire railway. During construction, Chinese technical personnel pioneered water and mud burst warning system, a hydrologic monitoring system for the complicated Karst tunnels and employed other innovative techniques; most of which now have filed invention patents applications.
