Pingtan Strait Rail-Road Bridge, Cross-sea road-rail bridge in Fuzhou, China
The Pingtan Strait Rail-Road Bridge is a two-deck crossing between Songxia in Changle and Suao on Haitan Island. Its upper deck carries a six-lane expressway; the lower deck holds a double-track railway. The main navigable spans are steel truss hybrid cable-stayed bridges, including the 532-metre Yuanhong Channel span, with concrete piers and approach viaducts.
Construction began on 30 October 2013 together with the Fuping Railway. The first pile was drilled on Renyu Island on 6 May 2014, and the whole bridge was joined on 25 September 2019. The highway deck opened to traffic on 1 October 2020, and the railway followed on 26 December 2020.
The bridge carries the Fuping Railway and the Changle–Pingtan expressway, part of the Beijing–Taipei expressway network, so trains and cars cross the strait on one structure. Its name comes from Pingtan, the island county it reaches at Su'ao Town, and from the Haitan Strait it spans.
The bridge itself is not open to pedestrian walking, but it can be viewed from vehicles or trains crossing it. Those wanting to see the structure can view and photograph it from nearby vantage points along the shores.
The strait is one of the world's three great wind areas alongside Bermuda and Cape Horn, and builders call it a "bridge-building forbidden zone"; wave and current forces reach over ten times those of ordinary inland river bridges. To work there, the China Railway Major Bridge Engineering Group spent 340 million yuan on the "Bridge Seagull", a self-propelled twin-jib luffing crane barge lifting 3,600 tonnes.
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