Recently, the shield machine with unit number 23459, independently developed and manufactured by CCCC Tianhe and used for the right line of the Baifang Shield Shaft to Fangshi Station section in Civil Works Section 6 of the Fangcun–Baiyun Airport North Intercity Line (Fangbai Intercity) of the Guangzhou Metro, was successfully launched, marking that the section has officially entered the shield tunneling stage.

The right line of the Baifang Shield Shaft to Fangshi Station section is 2,047.897 meters long, with a total of 1,279 ring segments, a minimum curvature radius of R1500m, a maximum longitudinal slope of 10‰, and a tunnel invert burial depth of 10.2–18.4 m. The shield machine was launched from the small-mileage end of Fangshi Station and will arrive at the Baifang Shield Shaft for reception. After leaving Fangshi Station, the section alignment runs straight south and passes underneath Planning Hengyi Road, then passes alongside the No. 09 high-voltage tower of the 500kV Beizengyi Line, the No. 09 high-voltage tower of the Beizengjia Line, the Fenghuayuan Agricultural Park, the No. 08 high-voltage tower of the 220kV Beichajia Line, and the No. 08 and No. 09 high-voltage towers of the 220kV Beihanjia Line, and continues south to pass underneath important structures such as the Guangzhou Liuxiwan Agricultural Ecological Base, the Northeast Freight Bypass Railway Bridge, the subgrade section of the North Second Ring Expressway, and the Daguan Agricultural Flower Base; the geology traversed is mainly completely weathered argillaceous siltstone, strongly weathered argillaceous siltstone, and moderately weathered argillaceous siltstone, with local risks including composite strata of sand over rock and full-face sand layers. The geological conditions are complex, the tunneling risk is high, and the technical difficulty is great.

Since the shield machine entered the site, in the face of many difficult factors, the company specially developed and designed the shield selection for this section. The complete machine assembly is about 125 meters long, with an excavation diameter of 8.84 meters and a total weight of about 1,100 tons. It adopts functions such as visualization of the soil chamber, tunnel cooling and temperature reduction, and automatic measurement of the shield tail clearance. At the same time, it innovatively adopts devices such as double-screw anti-blowout, soil chamber bulkhead, and screw conveyor barrel to monitor abnormal conditions in the chamber in real time, providing safe and reliable technical support for shield tunneling in this section.

Up to now, the civil engineering works of the Fangbai Intercity (Fangcun–Baiyun Airport North) have been completed by 22% in total. Among the 10 stations, 1 has been capped, 8 are under civil construction, and the remaining 1 is in preliminary preparation; among the 10 sections, 6 are under civil construction and the other 4 are in preliminary preparation; Lines II, III, and IV of the depot access line are under civil construction, and a total of 14 shield machines are tunneling. Among them, CCCC Tianhe has provided a total of 8 shield machines of 8.8 meters for the Guangzhou Fangbai Intercity, and this is the 6th one to be launched for tunneling.