On September 23, the Xianxin Road Yangtze River Bridge, a world-class project built by the Nanjing Public Works Construction Center with the participation of CCCC Second Harbor Engineering Co., Ltd., was successfully closed, marking a solid step toward the goal of opening to traffic in 2024.

The Xianxin Road river-crossing channel is located on the northeast side of Nanjing, about 6.2 kilometers upstream from the Nanjing Baguazhou Yangtze River Bridge and about 4.3 kilometers downstream from the Nanjing Qixiashan Yangtze River Bridge, with a total length of about 13.17 kilometers. The main line of the channel is designed for a speed of 80 kilometers per hour, with six lanes in both directions, and is built to urban expressway standards. Because it passes through a chemical industrial park, and in consideration of the need for vehicles transporting hazardous chemicals to cross the river, the Xianxin Road river-crossing channel will in the future become Nanjing's first river-crossing channel that permits vehicles carrying hazardous chemicals. The channel's key control project, the Xianxin Road Yangtze River Bridge, has a main span of 1,760 meters and main towers 263.8 meters high; once completed, it will become the suspension bridge with the largest span in China and the third-largest in the world.

Zhang Guohao, project manager of the Xianxin Road project for CCCC Second Harbor Engineering Co., Ltd., introduced: "The main girder of the bridge adopts a steel box girder form, divided into 6 types and 97 segments, lifted symmetrically and synchronously in sequence from mid-span toward the main towers by 2 sets of 500-ton cable-mounted cranes, and divided by work area into shallow-water and deep-water zones." The shallow-water zone has a total of 36 segments, with the heaviest box girder weighing about 333 tons, equivalent to the weight of more than 200 passenger cars. The deep-water zone has a total of 61 segments, with the heaviest box girder weighing about 270 tons.

In response to the problems brought by the heavy steel box girders, the high precision requirements for positioning, and the busy Yangtze River navigation channel, the construction unit and the construction team discussed and optimized the scheme many times and organized reviews by well-known bridge experts to ensure that the lifting process was safe and controllable. In addition, the Jiangsu Maritime Safety Administration and other departments made every effort to safeguard the safety of the operations and navigation, ensuring that navigation in the Nanjing section of the Yangtze River remained uninterrupted and orderly during construction.

In 2023, the Xianxin Road river-crossing channel successively completed important milestones such as the erection of the main cables and the breakthrough of the Wulongshan Tunnel. On June 20, the first steel box girder of the bridge was successfully lifted. Over the following three months, the builders overcame difficulties including the impact of typhoons, summer high temperatures, severe rainstorm weather, complex construction conditions, great pressure from closing the Yangtze River navigation channel, and high difficulty of safety prevention and control. During the lifting process, they also carried out real-time monitoring of the alignment of the main cables and steel box girders and the deviation of the bridge towers, analyzed and calculated each lifting stage, and predicted and guided subsequent construction, so as to ultimately achieve the designed alignment.

As a major urban development project of Nanjing during the 14th Five-Year Plan period and an important component of Nanjing's "expressway and rapid road system," the completion of the project will be a strong measure for implementing national strategies such as the integrated development of the Yangtze River Delta and the development of the Yangtze River Economic Belt, and will help ease the pressure of river-crossing traffic and improve the convenience of connections between Jiangbei and Longpao and the Xianlin sub-city and the main city. By then, the drive from Qixia Avenue to Jiangbei Avenue will be shortened from the original 1 hour to 10 minutes.