Anyone who has done a work at home will have already experienced firsthand that they know when it starts but not when it ends, something that happens in domestic works and that we also see from time to time with public works. And large infrastructures take time, although we have seen real records like this 10-story building in just 29 hours. Of course, in China. Precisely there, in the city of Longyan in the southeast of the country, is where they have made a train station overnight. Literal.
And although the work is a milestone in 2026, the reality is that this reform in record time took place in January 2018 and left Elon Musk with his mouth open, who had no qualms in stating that “China’s progress in advanced infrastructure is more than 100 times faster than that of the United States.”
As China Central Television reported, at 6:05 p.m. the station closed and only 17 minutes later the remodeling kicked off in an action that more than a construction seems like a synchronized swimming act until 3:30 in the morning, the time of the end.
A kind of “open heart operation” in public works
Only nine hours for a project that, although it is true that it was not a new station from scratch, was not exactly small: it consisted of a remodeling and connection of roads between a new high-speed line between Longyan and Nanping and three existing railway lines. Furthermore, they decided to do it at night so as not to interrupt daily rail traffic.
Because at 6:22 p.m., 1,500 workers grouped in seven units were executing seven different simultaneous tasks, as Zhan Daosong, deputy manager of China Tiesiju Civil Engineering Group, the main railway construction company in China, said. To carry it out, they relied on seven trains and 23 excavators. Thus, while one group installed monitoring and signage equipment, another paved the land.
The millimeter precision and rapport is such that Reminiscent of open heart surgery but transferred to public works: with workers distributed over a range of 1.5 kilometers in their assigned places and 23 coordination teams to ensure compliance with deadlines and processes. Something like this is not done overnight, however before the day of truth they did six large-scale drills to prepare.
The decision to do it at night has an explanation: not to interrupt the day’s rail traffic because in fact, at 1:56 in the morning they already had the first test train accessing the new station. Because they had also estimated a verification period of three and a half hours in which three other trains accessed the facilities. At 5:53 in the morning the rehearsals were over: K297, a normal passenger train, arrived at the station.
As impressive as the speed of the project, which involves enormous planning work and prior studies, was the achievement achieved: reducing the travel time between both cities from seven hours to just an hour and a half thanks to the high-speed train that travels along the track at 200 km/h.
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Cover | CGNT
