Recently, railway workers from the Hefei Track Maintenance Depot have been carrying out track fine-tuning work on the Lujiang section of the Lu-Tong Railway. After four years of construction, fine-tuning is now in full swing in preparation for integrated testing and commissioning and the railway's opening to traffic by the end of the year.
After four years of intensive construction, the main works of the Lu-Tong Railway project have been fully completed, with the entire line scheduled to open to traffic this year. The Lu-Tong Railway starts from the existing Ketang Station on the Hefei-Jiujiang Railway in Lujiang County, passes through Lujiang County of Hefei City and Wuwei County of Wuhu City, crosses the Yangtze River on a bridge shared with the Hefei-Fuzhou High-Speed Railway into Yi'an District of Tongling City, and connects with the existing Wuhu-Tongling Railway at Zhongming Station. The line is 112 kilometers long, with a total investment of about 5.4 billion yuan.
The Lu-Tong Railway has 10 stations along its entire length: Ketang, Zhangqigan, Lujiang South, Longqiao, Huangtun, Hongxiang, Xiang'an, Wuwei South, Liutan and Zhongming. Among them, Ketang and Zhongming stations are the connection stations of this line with the Hefei-Jiujiang and Wuhu-Tongling railways and are existing stations; all other stations are newly built.
In its early stage, the Lu-Tong Railway will mainly handle freight trains; it will only handle a small number of conventional-speed passenger trains to meet the travel needs of towns along the line. Once completed, the Lu-Tong Railway will form a new transport corridor for coal and mineral resources in Anhui Province, playing an important role in promoting the construction of the "Lianghuai" 100-million-ton coal production base, the development of large mineral resources such as Lunan, and the development of the industrial belt along the Yangtze River. The reporter learned that in addition to the planned construction of power plants and steel mills along the Lu-Tong Railway, the provincial energy department also plans to build a coal energy reserve center, the largest in Anhui Province.