On January 20, at the command of the chief engineer of the Fuzhou-Xiamen Railway Section 5, the blasting of the last 2 meters of surrounding rock in the Xiamen Village Tunnel of the Fuzhou-Xiamen High-Speed Railway was successfully completed. This marks a phased victory for a key project on the Fuzhou-Xiamen High-Speed Railway that involves great construction difficulty and high safety risks, laying a solid foundation for the full-scale construction of ballastless track in 2021.

The Xiamen Village Tunnel, with a total length of 972 meters, is a key project of the Fuzhou-Xiamen High-Speed Railway and is located within Quanzhou City, Fujian Province. It is constructed by China Railway Shanghai Engineering Bureau Group Co., Ltd. During construction, the Xiamen Village Tunnel needed to pass through 1 fault, 14 variable cross-sections, and 2 densely jointed zones; at the tunnel exit, where it passes beneath the Quanzhou Ring Expressway, the tunnel crown is only one story high below the expressway pavement, making it an ultra-shallow-buried tunnel. Tunnel construction in the shallow-buried section with broken surrounding rock is highly prone to ground settlement and collapse accidents. In addition, the tunnel exit is only 30 meters from the village, and blasting construction is very likely to have a negative impact on residents' lives. The complex geological structure and human conditions of the tunnel were called a "hard bone to gnaw" by the project builders. To solve these problems, the builders, based on advanced geological forecasting and monitoring measurement data, promptly adjusted the surrounding rock grade and optimized support parameters, adopted measures combining "prevention, drainage, and plugging" to control settlement of the existing expressway pavement to within 1 cm, and developed a combination of 5 types of large and medium-sized machinery, including splitting rods and down-the-hole drills, for construction at the tunnel exit. This research also won 1 utility model patent from the State Intellectual Property Office, providing a solution for the industry in areas with a large proportion of Grade V surrounding rock, underpasses beneath expressways, and proximity to residential areas.

It is reported that the tunnel also pioneered the application of a BIM digital delivery platform across the entire line, using REVIT for parametric modeling and the BIM digital delivery platform to integrate information, behaviors, and resources from various stages of tunnel construction into a single model, integrating the real information of the engineering entity. Through this system, it is possible to query construction process-related information for specific parts and to grasp in real time, through visualized 3D models, the safety step distance, settlement observation, and advanced geological forecasting conditions of the tunnel, realizing reverse traceability process management for quality and safety.

The Fuzhou-Xiamen High-Speed Railway has a total length of 277.42 kilometers, a bridge-tunnel ratio of 85.57%, and a designed speed of 350 kilometers per hour. After completion and opening to traffic, the travel time from Fuzhou to Xiamen will be shortened to less than 1 hour. The completion of this railway will improve the rapid railway network along the southeast coast and further facilitate interconnection between the Maritime Silk Road and the Yangtze River Economic Belt and the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei urban agglomeration.