Recently, at the construction site of the Gaoligongshan Tunnel on the Dali-Ruili Railway in Baoshan City, Yunnan Province, the Shantui E3H-040 concrete mixing plant successfully completed installation and commissioning and is about to be applied to tunnel construction. This is another major achievement following China's first underground railway tunnel mixing plant — the Shantui Jianyou E5R-180 concrete mixing plant — and together with the E5R-180 it will provide concrete support for the project construction.

The newly completed concrete mixing plant fully takes into account the overall environment and construction conditions inside the tunnel. Overcoming difficulties such as limited transport space and limited installation space, the E3H-040 concrete mixing plant, which facilitates flexible construction and convenient installation, was selected. It can achieve simultaneous supply of concrete from above ground and underground, effectively solving the bottleneck problem of concrete transportation, greatly improving the construction efficiency of underground operations, and laying a solid foundation for the early completion and breakthrough of the Gaoligongshan Tunnel.

The E3H-040 concrete mixing plant occupies a small footprint, features containerized modules, is easy to relocate, and is convenient to operate and maintain. It adopts skip hoisting for material feeding and double-rope hoisting, and adds anti-rewind time protection and upper working limit self-detection functions, providing higher safety. The powder metering adopts a compression-type weighing structure, with metering accuracy 50% higher than the standard, making material proportioning more precise. The core component, the mixing host, adopts the "Engineering King" mixer, which provides better mixing uniformity and better meets the application needs of bridge and tunnel construction, and will surely add wings to the project construction.

It is reported that the Gaoligongshan Tunnel is an important component of the Baoshan-Ruili section (Baorui section) of the Dali-Ruili Railway. It is China's first super project to cross the Hengduan Mountains and is also a controlling project of the Dali-Ruili Railway. Once the tunnel is completed, the travel time through the mountain is expected to be only 15 minutes, which will greatly shorten the driving time from Dali to Ruili, provide convenience for local residents' travel, and also help strengthen trade exchanges between China and Southeast Asia, the Middle East and other regions, and promote the economic development of the western region.