The Padma Bridge in Bangladesh opened to traffic on June 25 after eight years of construction.
The project was conducted by China Railway Major Bridge Reconnaissance & Design Institute Co., Ltd., China Railway Major Bridge Engineering Group Co., Ltd., and China Railway Hi-Tech Industry Co., Ltd., all subsidiaries of China Railway Group Limited (CREC).
Dubbed "Water for Life of Bangladesh", the Padma River geologically divides the country into two parts. Before the Padma Bridge, only one highway-railway dual-use bridge crossed the river’s upper reaches and no bridge crossed its lower reaches due to the width of the river and the rapid water speed. Local people could only cross the river by boat.
Located about 40 kilometers southwest of Dhaka, the capital of the country, ground was broken for the bridge's construction in 2014.
It is a highway-railway dual-use bridge with a double-layer steel truss structure. The upper layer is a four-lane highway with a designed speed of 100 kilometers per hour and the bottom layer is a single-track railway with the same designed speed as that of the upper highway. It is the largest overseas individual bridge project contracted by Chinese enterprises.
The river bed of the Padma River is mainly composed of superfine sand and soft clay, which leads to difficulty in bridge construction due to extremely unstable geological conditions.
The bridge was designed with a total of 40 piers in the water, and each main pier consists of six 3-meter-diameter, 120-meter-long and 550-metric-ton steel piles. Almost each pier had to be re-designed during construction because of different engineering challenges.
In order to build the piers in the river, the company purchased a power hydraulic pile hammer that was then the world's second-largest device of that kind.
The main bridge has a 150-meter steel truss girder structure, which is the heaviest and longest integral steel girder structure in the world. The "Tianyi" transport-erection ship developed by China Railway Major Bridge Engineering Group Co., Ltd. was used for engineering.
The Padma Bridge is a key junction of Belt and Road construction and a joint to connect with China and the pan-Asian Railway in the South.
Upon operation, it is expected to make travel easier between Dhaka and the 21 districts in South Bangladesh and shorten river-crossing time from nearly eight hours to 10 minutes.
(Executive editor: WangRuoting)
