On November 11, the renovation project of Shuohuang Railway’s 243A# steel truss girder was successfully completed. The project employed the nation’s first combined technique of winch-driven longitudinal movement and jack-driven lateral shifting, accumulating valuable experiences for bridge replacement on busy trunk lines without or with minimal traffic disruption.

The replaced 243A# steel truss girder is located on the up-line of Shuohuang Railway’s Grand Canal Bridge, with a span of 64 meters. The construction conditions were extremely complex: one side bordered the continuously operating down-line, while the other was only 30 meters from the under-construction Shigang Intercity Railway. The narrow workspace and significant interference from concurrent construction posed major challenges. Under the prerequisite of ensuring normal railway operations, the engineering team had to replace the 65.1-meter-long, 420-tonne new girder within limited track possession time—a highly difficult task with no directly applicable domestic experience in heavy-haul railway construction.

Facing the dual challenges of “uninterrupted traffic” and “space constraints”, the Company adhered to the principles of “safety, speed, economy, and reliability”, innovatively adopting a precise “l(fā)ongitudinal + lateral” shifting construction scheme: longitudinal movement utilized a 16-tonne slow-speed winch for traction via “cross-beams + sliders”, while lateral movement employed two 100-tonne continuous jacks to push the girder into position on pre-set lateral sliding tracks. This method effectively overcame space and time limitations, avoided multiple jacking of the steel truss girder due to multi-directional slider installation, significantly simplified the process, and improved beam replacement efficiency, offering a new solution for similar projects.

The successful completion of this project has not only fully addressed safety risks caused by the aging bridge structure but also significantly enhanced the bridge’s load-bearing capacity and durability. It ensures a substantial increase in the traffic capacity and safety redundancy of this critical energy artery. While achieving the core goal of safeguarding railway transport safety, the project validated advanced construction techniques for efficient and precise large-span, heavy-tonnage bridge replacement under complex operating conditions, providing a highly valuable reference model for the upgrade and renovation of existing railway lines in China.