Construction of China's northernmost high-speed railway station starts

Construction on Yichun West Station, China's northernmost high-speed railway station, officially started on Wednesday in northeast China's Heilongjiang Province.

The station is designed to have a total floor area of 19,985 square meters and can accommodate up to 1,500 passengers at a time, according to the China Railway Harbin Bureau Group Co Ltd.

The station is on the Tieli-Yichun section of a high-speed rail line linking the provincial capital of Harbin with the city of Yichun. The section, the northernmost high-speed railway currently under construction in China, has a total length of 111.4 km and a designed maximum speed of 250 km per hour.

Along the section, there are island-shaped permafrost zones, while the permafrost layer at the construction site of the Yichun West Station is 2.9 meters thick, resulting in poor stability and great difficulty for its construction.

To tackle the problem, China Railway Construction Group Co Ltd and a team led by Ling Xianzhang, a professor with the Harbin Institute of Technology, have adopted new technologies to solidify soil and thus prevent and control damages from permafrost.

After the completion of the whole rail line, a high-speed railway trip between Harbin and Yichun will take around two hours. It currently takes seven hours to travel between these two cities by train.