China builds world's deepest high-speed rail station

Badaling Great Wall Station, located 102 meters below the Great Wall, is considered a modern engineering wonder.

With the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics approaching, the world's first self-driving high-speed train has come into operation, transporting athletes and officials between the two main competition cities on the railway. Beijing Intercity - Zhangjiakou. The self-driving bullet train alone is special enough. But part of the 56-minute journey also runs through another engineering wonder, Badaling Great Wall Station.

The elevator leads down to Badaling Great Wall Station.

Completed in 2019, the station is located not far from the entrance to Badaling, the most famous section of the millennial wall. To protect the iconic building from structural damage, the railway line and accompanying station were built deep underground. Located at a depth of 102 meters and covering an area of ​​more than 36,000 square meters, this three-storey structure is the world's deepest and widest underground high-speed railway station.

Building such a complex station with a 12km system of tunnels beneath a World Heritage Site was no easy task. Engineers use electric detonators to precisely time the explosion to milliseconds. This is the first time this technology has been used in China, allowing workers to maintain vibration velocities below 0.2 cm/s. That means each explosion is precisely calculated to ensure the impact is no stronger than a footstep on the Great Wall.

Starting in 2016, the construction of the tunnel and the station was completed after 3 years. High-speed rail shortens the travel time from Beijing to Badaling Great Wall from about 1.5 hours (or longer if traffic is congested) to 27 minutes. The station is only a few minutes from the Truong Thanh cable car station and about 800m from the starting point of the Bat Dat Linh Great Wall. It is also home to the second longest elevator in China, 88m long and 42m high.

Due to the distance to the platform, the station gate closes 12 minutes before the departure of the last train instead of 5 minutes like in other stations in China to ensure passengers have enough time to pass through the vast station.

Operating on the 174-kilometer Beijing-Zhangjiakou railway line is an electric-powered Fuxing multi-car high-speed train developed by China Railway Corporation. Launched in early January, the train can run at speeds of up to 350 km/h and shorten the travel time between the two main Olympic cities from 3 hours to 56 minutes.

Although the bullet train runs on autopilot, a monitoring driver is on hand at all times. The train can start, stop and adjust to different speed limits between stations. The train's eight carriages are equipped with 5G signals, smart lights and 2,718 sensors to collect real-time data and detect any problems during operation. Special carriages are designed according to the needs of athletes. For example, some carriages have a larger storage area for winter sports equipment, which can be accessed via scanning a QR code.