The West Qinling Tunnel () is in the middle of the

Lanzhou–Chongqing railway Lanzhou–Chongqing railway or Lanyu railway (, "Lan" and "Yu" being the abbreviations for Lanzhou and Chongqing) is a Higher-speed rail, higher-speed railway in China connecting Lanzhou and Chongqing. Construction started in 2010, last segment o ...

(), crossing the

Qinling The Qinling () or Qin Mountains, formerly known as the Nanshan ("Southern Mountains"), are a major east–west mountain range in southern Shaanxi Province, China. The mountains mark the divide between the drainage basins of the Yangtze and Yellow ...

. It is a 28236 metre dual-bore railway tunnel in

Wudu District Wudu District () is a district and the political and cultural centre of Longnan, Gansu province, China. It borders the provinces of Shaanxi and Sichuan to the southeast. It has a population of 590,000, of which 110,000 live in the urban area. Loc ...

Longnan Longnan () is a prefecture-level city in the southeast of Gansu province in China. It borders Sichuan on its south and Shaanxi on its east. As of the 2020 Chinese census, the population of the prefecture-level city was 2,855,555. Geography and ...

City,

Gansu Gansu (, ; alternately romanized as Kansu) is a province in Northwest China. Its capital and largest city is Lanzhou, in the southeast part of the province. The seventh-largest administrative district by area at , Gansu lies between the Tibet ...

, north-west China. It is the second longest railway tunnel in China, slightly shorter than the

New Guanjiao Tunnel New Guanjiao Tunnel () is a tunnel on the 2nd line of Qinghai–Tibet Railway in Guanjiao Mountain, Qinghai province. It is dual-bored, double-track rail tunnel. The total length of the tunnel is , which makes it the longest railway tunnel in C ...

. The construction started on August, 2008, and went on for a duration of about five months and five years using both

Tunnel boring machine A tunnel boring machine (TBM), also known as a "mole", is a machine used to excavate tunnels with a circular cross section through a variety of soil and rock strata. They may also be used for microtunneling. They can be designed to bore throu ...

s (TBM) and drill and blast methods.

References

{{coord missing, Gansu Railway tunnels in China Transport in Gansu Buildings and structures in Gansu Tunnels completed in 2016