On September 16, with a loud blast from blasting operations, excavation of the main tunnel of Tianzhushan No.1 Tunnel on the Xi'an-Shiyan High-Speed Railway surpassed the 10,000-meter mark. The tunnel is being built by Xicheng Passenger Dedicated Line Shaanxi Company and constructed by China Railway 11th Bureau Group. This marks a key milestone in tunnel construction and lays a solid foundation for the successful breakthrough of the entire tunnel.

Tianzhushan No.1 Tunnel has a total length of 14.742 kilometers and passes through the low mountain area at the southern foot of the Qinling Mountains, with a maximum burial depth of about 690 meters and a minimum burial depth of about 40 meters. The tunnel has complex geological conditions, including unfavorable geology such as dangerous rock, rockfall, fault fracture zones, karst, high ground stress, and mud and water inrush. It is a major and difficult control project along the entire Xi'an-Shiyan High-Speed Railway and a Class I high-risk tunnel, featuring high construction difficulty, complex geological conditions, and significant safety risks.

Xicheng Passenger Dedicated Line Shaanxi Company actively promotes grid-based management, continues to deepen the creation of quality projects, implements systems such as process acceptance, shift leadership production, and safety responsibility assurance, organizes participating units to establish scientific research task forces, actively adopts advanced geological forecasting, strengthens monitoring and measurement management, and uses an information management platform to monitor the entire construction process, ensuring safe and orderly tunnel excavation.

The Xi'an-Shiyan High-Speed Railway is an important stroke in Shaanxi's "米"-shaped high-speed rail network. The railway passes through the three cities of Xi'an, Shangluo, and Shiyan and connects to the already completed Wuhan-Shiyan High-Speed Railway. The newly built main line is 255.7 kilometers long, with a design speed of 350 kilometers per hour. The Shaanxi section has a total length of 169 kilometers and includes five stations along the route: Xi'an East, Lantian, Shangluo West, Shanyang, and Manchuan Pass.

After the Xi'an-Shiyan High-Speed Railway opens, Xi'an and Shiyan will be reachable within one hour, and the railway travel time from Xi'an to Wuhan will be shortened from the current 5 hours to about 2.5 hours. It will be of great significance for further improving the national high-speed railway network, narrowing the spatial and temporal distance between Shaanxi and regions such as the Yangtze River Delta and the Pearl River Delta, strengthening the connection between the Guanzhong urban agglomeration and the middle reaches of the Yangtze River urban agglomeration, supporting rural revitalization in the Qinba Mountain area, better supporting national development strategies such as the Belt and Road Initiative, the development of the Yangtze River Economic Belt, and the large-scale development of the western region, and driving economic and social development along the route.