On April 23, the caisson foundation of the north anchorage of the Jingzhou Libu Yangtze River Highway-Railway Bridge successfully achieved high-precision sinking into place, with the caisson in good posture and all technical indicators meeting design requirements, marking a major phased breakthrough in the bridge's construction.

The Jingzhou Libu Yangtze River Highway-Railway Bridge has a main span of 1120 m and is the world's largest-span double-decksteel truss girdercable-stayed–suspension cooperative system highway-railway dual-purpose bridge. The plan dimensions of its north anchorage caisson reach 76 m × 68 m, equivalent to the size of 12 standard basketball courts, with a height of 32.5 m, divided into six sections. Among them, the bottom first section of 8 m adopts a steel-shell concrete structure, and the entire caisson foundation weighs 102,000 tons, ranking among the largest in the world.

The north anchorage caisson foundation adopts the construction technique of "two times of height extension and two times of sinking." In the first stage of drained sinking, it took 29 days, with an average daily sinking of 30 cm; the second stage of undrained sinking lasted 93 days, with an average daily sinking of 22.2 cm, and the entire process was scientifically controllable.

Based on the theories of critical depth and critical width, the design and monitoring team proposed the principle of "progressive from inside to outside" for controlled soil extraction, precisely controlling the position and depth of soil extraction. At the same time, to ensure structural stability and precise positioning during the caisson sinking process, the project team installed 196 high-precision sensors at key parts of the caisson and equipped 4 sets of GNSSBeidou positioning systemsto build an intelligent digital monitoring platform. Through real-time data collection and transmission, the system can quickly analyze and warn of abnormal conditions, guide timely on-site adjustments, effectively avoid problems such as caisson tilting or deviation, and ensure smooth construction progress.

The Jingzhou Libu Yangtze River Highway-Railway Bridge is expected to be completed and open to traffic in 2028. By then, this bridge will become another important transportation link on the Yangtze River, further improving the backbone road network layout of the Yangtze River Economic Belt, injecting strong momentum into regional economic development, and promoting Jingzhou and surrounding areas to achieve a higher level of cross-river integrated development.