Recently, the 200-meter-tall Main Tower No. 8 of the North Navigation Channel Bridge of the Hangzhou Bay Sea-Crossing Railway Bridge, the world’s longest sea-crossing railway bridge constructed by China Railway Major Bridge Engineering Group, was successfully topped out. It is the first of the seven main towers across the bridge’s three navigation channel bridges to reach this milestone.
The Hangzhou Bay Sea-Crossing Railway Bridge is a key control project of the Nantong–Ningbo High-Speed Railway. Located upstream of the existing Hangzhou Bay Sea-Crossing Highway Bridge, it has a total length of 29.2 kilometers. The bridge consists of three navigation channel bridges—north, middle, and south—along with 26 kilometers of sea viaducts and shoal-area approach bridges. It adopts a double-track ballastless track design with a design speed of 350 km/h, representing an ultra-long high-speed railway bridge cluster project. Among them, the North Navigation Channel Bridge measures 932.7 meters in length and features a steel box–steel truss composite girder cable-stayed bridge structure with a span arrangement of (71.85 + 169.5 + 450 + 169.5 + 71.85) meters. Its 450-meter main span makes it the world’s largest-span ballastless-track cable-stayed bridge currently under construction. The No. 8 and No. 9 main towers adopt curved H-shaped reinforced concrete structures, each standing 200 meters tall, with extremely stringent requirements for construction precision.
