How many times have you agonised over how to get to Pudong Airport? Take the train to Hongqiao Railway Station and then the airport bus? Take the train to Shanghai Railway Station and then bus, metro or taxi? Either way you slice it, it’s a long trip.
Not for too much longer. Yesterday, 15 December, saw the cutter head on a tunnelling shield machine begin to turn as boring commenced on a direct rail link between Shanghai Hongqiao Transportation Hub and Shanghai Pudong International Airport. When complete, journey time between the two shall be just 40 minutes.
The long-awaited line shall have a total length of 68.6 kilometres. Trains travelling thereon are set to operate at speeds up to 160 kilometres per hour, reports the Yangtze Evening News.
Traversing the districts of Minhang and Xuhui, as well as Pudong New Area, the link will comprise nine stops; Hongqiao, Qibao, Huajing, Sanlin South, Zhangjiang, Dujia Area, Pudong Airport, another airport station as yet unconfirmed and Shanghai East Railway Station.
As well as linking Pudong and Hongqiao for our convenience, also worthy of mention along the way is Dujia Area as another stopping-off point for Shanghai Disneyland.
Interestingly, the new project has a deep relationship with Nanjing. Given that we know a thing or two about large-scale tunnels, many of the construction enterprises involved are from Nanjing.
According to Yu Pengchen, shield manager for the project, the shield machine is basically is an upgraded version of that used to bore the Yangtze River Tunnel for Nanjing Metro Line 10 a decade ago.
And it wouldn’t be China if there were not a few engineering marvels involved.
With the underground section running parallel to the Shanghai-Hangzhou high-speed railway, the two shall at one point be just 8.1 metres apart.
Over in the section under the G60 Shanghai-Kunming Expressway, the minimum clear distance between the tunnel and the foundations for one of the road’s bridges will be only 0.65 metres, a clearance without precedent in China.
Best of all though, being a train means we can be confident of getting to the airport on time. After all, with Shanghai’s traffic, how long the airport transfer bus takes at present is anyone’s guess.
The new link is slated to open by the end of 2024. Mark the date. There’s a chance that by then, international travel might well be a realistic undertaking.
