The China Railway Group Limited (CREC) has built more than 10,000 cross-river and cross-sea bridges, with the length of its completed railway lines able to circle around the terrestrial equator more than twice, leading China into the era of high-speed railway. From exploring China’s first electrified railway and the first high-speed railway, to the construction of the world’s first plateau railway and the longest sea-crossing bridge, the innovative CREC has enabled the Chinese construction engineering to achieve a leap from follower to leader. From assisting the construction of the Tanzania-Zambia Railway to realizing the operation of the Addis Ababa-Djibouti Railway, CREC has spread the excellent and high-quality Chinese construction engineering to more than 90 countries and regions.
Since the establishment of the Shanhaiguan Bridge Plant in 1894, CREC has gone through 127 years of highs and lows, seeing China’s railway construction industry rise from small beginnings to the global giant it is today.
Beijing-Zhangjiakou High-speed Railway spanning the Guanting Reservoir.
Loyalty and Dedication
The Shanhaiguan Bridge Plant was the predecessor of the China Railway Shanhaiguan Bridge Group, a subsidiary of CREC, and the first railway steel bridge manufacturer in China. In 1909, the Shanhaiguan Bridge Plant built steel bridges for the whole line of the Beijing-Zhangjiakou Railway, China’s first railway designed and constructed solely by Chinese.
During the early days of the People’s Republic of China, many projects waited to be done. CREC invested an unprecedented amount of enthusiasm, time, and money into national economic construction, repairing and building a large number of infrastructures such as railways and highways that were urgently needed for the growth of the national economy, and effectively taking the lead in national rejuvenation.
The Chengdu-Chongqing Railway, the first railway built in new China, started construction on June 15, 1950. The older generations of CREC people overcame difficulties and obstacles and cut into the mountains to connect Chengdu and Chongqing, two major cities in southwest China. Since then, building roads and serving the country has become the unswerving pursuit of CREC. In 1958, CREC started to build the Chengdu-Kunming Railway, another major trunkline in southwest China. The line traverses rugged terrain from the Sichuan Basin to the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau, which required hundreds of tunnels and bridges. It took 12 years to complete the entire line, which was praised by the United Nations as one of the three masterpieces created by mankind to conquer nature in the 20th century.
After this epic feat, a large number of historic and groundbreaking projects were achieved by CREC, including the Wuhan Yangtze River Bridge (the first bridge crossing the Yangtze River built in new China), Beijing Railway Station (one of the top 10 buildings at the time of the tenth anniversary of the founding of new China), Beijing Subway Line 1 (China’s first metro line), and Baoji-Chengdu Railway (China’s first electrified railway).
Innovative Development
The more than four decades of reform and opening-up is the golden age of China’s economic and social development, and is also the golden age of CREC’s rapid growth. From an infrastructure sector of the Ministry of Railways to a modern enterprise ranked 35th among the Fortune Global 500 today, CREC has grown beyond expectations. The value of its newly signed contracts has increased more than 500-fold compared to when the group was established in 1989, and its total profit has increased by more than 1,000-fold.
During this period, CREC always regarded innovation as the primary driving force for development, relying on three national laboratories for high-speed rail construction technology, shield tunneling technology, and bridge structure health and safety, as well as 13 nationally certified technology centers. It maintains a leading position in high-speed railways, plateau railways, heavy haul railways, electrified railways, bridge engineering, tunnel and underground engineering, high-end equipment manufacturing, and green environmental protection, with a large number of world-class scientific and technological achievements.
On the snow-covered plateau of Tibet, CREC overcame three of the major worldwide challenges in high-altitude construction, namely permafrost, alpine hypoxia, and ecological fragility, to build the Qinghai-Tibet Railway, one of China’s four major projects in the 21st century. Under the Yellow River, CREC challenged the bounds of extreme geology and built a tunnel to help the middle route of the South-to-North Water Diversion Project traverse the river in Henan Province. At the foot of the Great Wall, with great ingenuity, CREC designed and built China’s first intelligent high-speed railway – the Beijing-Zhangjiakou High-speed Railway. In the Taiwan Strait, one of the world’s three major stormy seas, CREC erected the Pingtan Strait Bridge, setting the record for the world’s longest cross-strait road-rail bridge once again.
With the pace of innovation, CREC has been at the forefront of the times. The cumulatively built railways account for 66 percent of China’s total railway mileage; the completed maglev, subway, and light rails account for 60 percent of China’s total urban rail transit project mileage; the completed high-speed railways account for 55 percent of the total mileage of China’s high-speed railways; while the completed cross-river, cross-sea bridges and long tunnels beneath mountains and oceans are nearly 50,000 kilometers long.
Meanwhile, CREC has also made 17 expeditions to Antarctica, undertaking the construction and maintenance tasks of Zhongshan Station, Great Wall Station, and Kunlun Station.
Sophisticated equipment has contributed a lot to the birth of these super projects. From the development of China’s first composite earth pressure-balance tunnel boring machine (TBM) in 2008 and China’s first hard rock TBM in 2010, to CREC’s 1,000th TBM in 2020, CREC has embarked on a road of independent innovation and development. Its market share has remained the largest in China for nine consecutive years, and its production and sales have ranked first in the world for four consecutive years.
Going Global
As one of the earliest Chinese companies to go global, CREC undertook one of China’s largest foreign aid projects, the Tanzania-Zambia Railway, in the 1970s. This railway has become the main traffic artery of East Africa and Central and Southern Africa. It has been hailed by the people of Tanzania and Zambia, and even Africa as a whole, as a “road to freedom” and a “model for South-South Cooperation.”
Nowadays, following the Belt and Road Initiative, CREC has provided services to nearly 100 countries and regions around the world. A large number of overseas projects, such as the Addis Ababa-Djibouti Railway, Angola Railway, Palm Islands in the UAE, light rails in Singapore and Ethiopia, Kigamboni Bridge in Tanzania, Algeria Airport, and Kamchiq Railway Tunnel in Uzbekistan, have been completed and put into use. Major projects including Indonesia’s Jakarta-Bandung High-speed Railway, the China-Laos Railway, Bangladesh Padma Multipurpose Bridge and Padma Bridge Rail Link, and the Budapest-Belgrade Railway are progressing steadily, and have been widely praised by the beneficiaries in those countries.
In the southern part of Dhaka, capital of Bangladesh, the Padma Bridge will be opened to traffic soon, which will end the thousands of years of ferry history on both sides of the Padma River, and shorten the original river crossing time from eight hours to 10 minutes. It will increase Bangladesh’s GDP by 1.5 percent annually.
In Georgia’s Mtskheta-Mtianeti region, shield tunneling has begun for the Kvesheti-Kobi highway tunnel. After the road is completed, it will greatly improve the traffic efficiency and safety of this major north-south thoroughfare, and strengthen the country’s important geographic, economic and trade position as a crossroads between Europe and Asia.
In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Ludangdri Bridge built by CREC has greatly improved local traffic and was imprinted on the country’s 50th anniversary commemorative coin. It symbolizes China-Congo friendship.
Starting from the Shanhaiguan Bridge Plant, over the course of 127 years, CREC has accomplished engineering feats one after another. Standing at a new historic starting point, CREC will continue to work hard and move forward courageously to contribute its part to China’s economic development and the progress of human society.
(Compiled by China Today)
