‘Unluckiest high-speed railway’: how Mother Nature bends human will in record-breaking infrastructure in western China
- A quake in Qinghai province and a damaged rail tunnel forced Chinese engineers and scientists to rethink how best to build high-speed railway lines
- The Lanxin Express between Lanzhou and Urumqi was hailed in 2016 but the service has since ground to a halt six times, largely due to once-vaunted tunnels
It was once a symbol of China’s progress, now it is a reminder of the limits of humanity.
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But the project’s completion was followed by seven years of hard luck. It ground to a halt six times, with the longest break stretching over a year and a half. It was a blow to China, which is proud of its engineering prowess and quality of projects. Observers of China’s high-speed rail programme took to social media, calling it the “unluckiest high-speed railway”.
According to Chinese media and public data, most of the reasons for suspension of the high-speed railway relate to once-vaunted tunnel projects.
The railway crosses the Qilian Mountains on the northeastern edge of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. The enormous folds and fault structures formed by crustal movement make the geology in the mountains extremely unstable.
Chinese engineers have long said the best way to cross the geographically unstable terrain is through tunnels. They once firmly believed that sudden geological disasters such as landslides and earthquakes would have a severe impact on surface structures but would cause relatively minor damage to underground projects – and even if the damage reached the tunnels, it would be relatively easy to repair.
