On January 11, the first steel truss girder segment of the Xinshi Jinsha River Bridge on the Yanjiang Expressway—Sichuan's tallest cable-stayed bridge under construction with the longest main span—was successfully hoisted into place, marking the full launch of steel truss girder erection and the bridge's formal entry into the critical stage of main steel truss girder installation.

The Xinshi Jinsha River Bridge spans two provinces in a single leap: its starting bank is Xinshi Town in Pingshan, Sichuan, and its ending bank is Nan'an Town in Suijiang, Yunnan. The bridge has a total length of 1,867 meters, including a 1,288-meter main bridge and a 579-meter approach bridge, and is a double-tower, double-cable-plane steel truss girder cable-stayed bridge. The cable tower on the Yunnan bank reaches a height of 297.51 meters, setting a new height record for cable-stayed bridges in Sichuan; the main span is 680 meters, making it the largest-span steel truss girder cable-stayed bridge of its kind currently under construction in Sichuan Province.

The bridge's steel truss girder is divided into 95 segments with a total weight of more than 22,000 tonnes, equivalent to the weight of a light aircraft carrier or about 50 Fuxing high-speed EMU trains. The first segment erected this time is the No. 0 segment of the No. 6 main tower on the Yunnan bank, measuring 18.38 meters long, 28 meters wide and 7.7 meters high, with a total weight of about 343 tonnes.

To overcome the operational difficulties of steep mountains on both banks and limited construction space, and to achieve high-precision matching between steel truss girder members, the participating units fully considered various abnormal situations that might arise during erection and adopted the "member-by-member assembly" scheme for installation, which divides the process into three stages: "lifting members onto the bridge," "assembling truss panels," and "turning and positioning for installation." During installation, a tower crane at the top of the tower, about 330 meters above the river surface, is used to hoist the members totaling about 343 tonnes in batches to the lower crossbeam of the 120-meter-high main tower for installation. Subsequent segments will be installed using a 360° movable full-slewing deck crane with a self-weight of 150 tonnes and a lifting capacity of 70 tonnes.

The Yanjiang Expressway is currently the expressway project with the largest single-project investment in China's expressway construction history, the longest construction mileage within Sichuan, and the greatest construction difficulty. It is an important outbound corridor from Sichuan connecting Chengdu to the Panxi Economic Zone, linking South Asia and connecting rivers to the sea, and also a major poverty-alleviation corridor serving the Wumeng Mountain area and the Yi regions of the Greater and Lesser Liangshan Mountains. The project is scheduled to be completed and opened to traffic across the entire line in 2025, when it will add a new westward outbound expressway for Sichuan, further improve the expressway network, promote rural revitalization in ethnic minority areas, and more strongly support Sichuan Province in advancing the overall development of the Yangtze River Economic Belt and the Belt and Road Initiative.