Shenzhen and Jiangmen will be connected within 1 hour, and Shenzhen and the Guangzhou Nansha Free Trade Zone will be linked by a half-hour high-speed railway. All of this will become reality once the Shenzhen-Jiangmen Railway project is completed and opened to traffic.

Recently, the Shenzhen section and the Dongguan section of the Shenzhen-Jiangmen Railway have both made new progress on key and difficult control projects.

In the Shenzhen section of the project, key and difficult control projects such as the Yangtaishan Tunnel and the Shenzhen-Dongguan Tunnel (connecting line) have begun tunnel excavation, and construction and production across the entire line have entered a stage of comprehensive acceleration.

Gaofeng Reservoir Bridge and Yangtaishan Tunnel of the Shenzhen-Jiangmen Railway

The Shenzhen-Dongguan Tunnel (connecting line) has a total length of 7,324.878 meters and is constructed using a combined drill-and-blast and shield tunneling method. Among these, the construction involving a large-diameter dual-mode earth-pressure/slurry shield in composite strata densely passing beneath diverse buildings is the first of its kind in China, and breakthrough is expected in 2027.

Meanwhile, the third-layer frame beam of the retaining structure of the No. 5 working shaft of the Shenzhen-Dongguan Tunnel—currently the largest single-shield TBM working shaft for a railway tunnel among the line's control projects—has been poured.

The No. 5 working shaft is located north of Bao'an Airport within the Phase IV airport expansion area. It is 26.45 meters long and 28.3 meters wide, with a foundation pit depth of approximately 65.4 meters, and is constructed using the open-cut top-down method.

The working shaft is designed to be deep, with complex construction techniques, frequent process conversions, a tight schedule, high construction safety risks, and high civilized-construction requirements.

In the Dongguan section of the project, the shield launching section of the Shenzhen-Dongguan Tunnel has entered the main structure construction stage.

The Dongguan section of the Shenzhen-Jiangmen Railway is approximately 13.5 kilometers long. The line starts at No. 7 working shaft next to the Binhaiwan Kexing Science Park, builds the Shenzhen-Dongguan Tunnel eastward beneath the Maozhou River to connect with the Shenzhen section, and builds three elevated track projects westward—the Extra-Large Bridge over the Yanjiang Expressway, the Binhaiwan Station Extra-Large Bridge, and the Shajiao Extra-Large Bridge—ending at Taisha Road on the Shajiao Peninsula, where it connects with the Pearl River Estuary Tunnel.

The No. 7 working shaft is located at the western exit of the Shenzhen-Dongguan Tunnel, where the shield launching section tunnel is under construction. The launching section tunnel is approximately 250 meters long and reaches a maximum depth of 28 meters. The more than 200-meter-long shield machine will be assembled in this launching section tunnel and will excavate toward the Maozhou River in the Shenzhen direction.

At present, in a processing plant in Changsha, Hunan, more than 700 kilometers away from Dongguan, the shield machine is undergoing intensive processing and production.

According to the plan, the shield machine will complete processing in Changsha in October, the launching section tunnel construction will be completed by the end of December, and the shield machine will then be lowered into the shaft for assembly and excavation toward the Maozhou River-Shenzhen direction.

As the Shenzhen-Dongguan Tunnel enters a new stage of construction, the two bridge projects—the Extra-Large Bridge over the Yanjiang Expressway and the Binhaiwan Station Extra-Large Bridge—are also stepping up pile foundation construction and pier construction.

At present, the Extra-Large Bridge over the Yanjiang Expressway has completed 525 pile foundations, 13 pile caps, and 5 pier shafts; the main pier No. 48 of the 228-meter continuous beam over Fuhai Road has been completed, and continuous beam construction is underway.

The Shenzhen-Jiangmen Railway is an important component of the coastal high-speed railway in the national "Eight Vertical and Eight Horizontal" plan. The main line starts from Xili Station in the Shenzhen hub, and the connecting line starts from Shenzhen North Station, passing through Bao'an in Shenzhen, Binhaiwan in Dongguan, Nansha in Guangzhou, and Zhongshan to Jiangmen. The main line has a total length of 116 kilometers, a construction period of 5.5 years (excluding the advance-started section), and is expected to open to traffic in 2028.

The entire line has 7 stations: Shenzhen Xili, Shenzhen Airport East, Dongguan Binhaiwan, Nansha, Zhongshan North, Henglan, and Jiangmen.

Among them, the Shenzhen Xili to Nansha section is designed for a speed of 200 kilometers per hour, and the Nansha to Jiangmen section is designed for a speed of 250 kilometers per hour.

The project connects through at Xili Station in the Shenzhen hub with the Ganzhou-Shenzhen High-Speed Railway; at Shenzhen North Station, it links with the Xiamen-Shenzhen Railway and the Guangzhou-Shenzhen-Hong Kong High-Speed Railway via the Shenzhen North to Shenzhen Airport East connecting line; at Zhongshan North Station, it connects in the Zhuhai-to-Shenzhen direction via a connecting line; and at Jiangmen Station, it connects through with the main line of the Jiangmen-to-Maoming section of the Shenzhen-Maoming Railway.

The project is of great significance for further opening up the east-west railway corridor in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area.