NorthSouth Freight - Report 001: Punching through Himalaya's Gaolingong to reach the Bay of Bengal.
Rocks were so hard and sediments so water logged that each time they punched a hole through, water would rained from the dammed-up natural reservoirs to flood the work areas. After that, it took weeks to pump off the water. As a result, inside Hengduan, the mountains just outside of Baoshan, the drilling, blasting and digging for a tunnel managed to advance 1 metre a week, 156 metres after two years.
The Hengduan range 横断山脉, highest point Mt Gongga 7,556 m, is at the farthest, eastern point at which the Tibetan plateau meets the Himalayas. Completed, at last, that 17.6 km tunnel known as Dazhushan 大柱山 has opened the first part of the Dali-to-Ruili 大瑞铁路 passenger and freight rail line.
Says Wu Lijun, the rail project manager: "On the train, you will cross the tunnel in eight minutes which we took 14 years to build."
On the Dali-Baoshan leg, the terminal station of Baoshan 保山, population 2.5 million, is something of a half-way stop and midway division in the 330-km Dali-Ruili 大瑞铁路 line. Beyond Ruili 瑞丽 on the Shweli River, Longchuan 龙川江 to the Chinese, is the town of Muse on Myanmar territory.
Unlike the China-Laos Railway launch in December 2021, there was no confetti nor trumpets when, first thing Friday morning, July 22, the passenger train left Baoshan the first time. The subdued launch has to be: After all, Ruili in the opposite westward direction of Baoshan, is another 197 km to go. Yangon, Myanmar, is yet another 700 km.
Originally, the China-Myanmar alignment was to follow the route of an existing pipeline carrying oil and gas from the Indian Ocean coast at Kyaukpyu of Myanmar to Kunming, the Yunnan capital (see map above).
The Chinese Dali-Ruili leg in Yunnan province is on a east-west alignment. Cross Ruili into Myanmar's Muse, the track will veer southwards towards the coast. That portion of the line on lower terrain and less mountainous is, hence, relatively easier to build.
Dali-Ruili has been notoriously difficult although line construction is at only half the attitude of Tibet's 4,000-metre-high plateau. The Dazhushan tunnel entry-exit point is a near vertical 500-odd metre drop to the Lancang river below. Crossing the river on an arched steel truss and concrete box girder bridge, the track line immediately comes to another tunnel in the opposite mountain face. In this way, into mountains, over valleys and rivers, Dali-Baoshan was built, with nine of ten km of tracks actually sitting on top of pylon bridges (34 numbers in total) and inside tunnels (21).
More challenging tasks lay on the Baoshan-Ruili leg that ends in the Myanmar border.
Some fifty km west of Baoshan, the line crosses the Nujiang river which in last big war had stopped the Japanese advance, a regiment of 10,000 vs several hundred peasant soldiers starring at them from the opposite side. The river had saved an entire population from slaughter. Over the Nujiang, mountain facing mountain, is a bridge even more complex than Dazhushan, 1,045 m long, tunnel entrance to tunnel entrance (technically called an 'adit').
After that comes the biggest of all construction works, which is punching through the Gaolingong 高黎贡山, a sub-mountain range of Hengduan. For 34.5 km, that tunnel through Gaolingong overcomes the last and most formidable nature's barrier into Myanmar. Beyond which, the rail line is a clear run into the Indian Ocean coast. It will free China from the narrow Straits of Malacca stranglehold which for decades the US has dreamt of in order to choke the life out of Chinese ocean freight trade, in particular the transit of oil and gas.
On the Chinese side, the China-Myanmar rail line isn't just an infrastructure but an economic corridor, with planned housing to serve existing farming districts and new industrial zones, primarily light manufacturing. This is identical in concept to the freight and passenger rail lines running north-south through the rest of Indo-China.
Take for example the Kunming-Vientiane line 中老鐵路老撾段 . It runs for 1,000 km, terminal to terminal, half on the Yunnan side, the other half Laotian. From the Laos capital of Vientiane, the line continues to Chiangmai's Nong Khai then onward to Bangkok. Opened half a year ago, the Laotian side has nine cargo stations each alternating between 11 passenger ones.
Dali-Baoshan has two dual used passenger-cargo stops, two for passengers only and the fifth Baoshan North 保山北 dedicated to freight only. Scheduled on Dali-Baoshan are four pairs of passenger trains, with five pairs for freight that will move building materials, chemicals and agricultural products. Timber from Myanmar is big business in Yunnan as are jade and semi-precious stones.
Passenger trains on the route are supplemented by three more pairs on the Kunming-Baoshan run. At the designed top speed of 140 kmh, Dali-Baoshan rail will take 69 minutes instead of two hours by road; Kunming-Baoshan 3 hours and 26 minutes vs seven to eight hours, without stops.
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