The Heihe-Blagoveshchensk Heilongjiang Highway and River Bridge

The Heihe-Blagoveshchensk-Heilongjiang project involves constructing an international highway and rail bridge connecting Russia with China. The total length of the highway bridge will be 19.9 kilometers while the railroad bridge will be 128 kilometers long. The bridges are being built across a river that is called the Amur in Russia while it is called the Heilongjiang River in China. The goal of this ambitious project is to connect China’s Jilin-Heilongjiang highway with a Russian highway located in Blagoveshchensk. China is building a section of the highway that will be 6.5 kilometers long and that will begin in Changfatun, Heihe City in the province of Heilongjiang. The outstanding 13.4 kilometers of the highway is being built in Russia and will stretch from the village of Canikulgan in Blagoveshchensk. The railroad bridge will be 14.5 meters wide and will be a cable-stayed bridge with low pylons supported by a pier built in the shape of a Y.

Sharing Expenses

It was decided that China and Russia would share the costs of the project. The nature of the cooperation would be determined by a range of factors, such as how much each country would be doing to complete the total development. It is estimated that the cost of the entire project will amount to $358 million. Russia will be shelling out most of it, but China will be responsible for $81.7 million of the total cost.

Project History

Discussions around the construction of the Heihe-Blagoveshchensk-Heilongjiang Highway and River Bridge first started in 1988 and continued for some years as negotiations between Russia and China were prolonged.

Finally, an agreement between the government of Russia and the government of China was reached in 2015. The two countries began working together on all aspects of the construction project from the initial design through to its construction and eventually also to its management and operation. They also reached an agreement as to the management and operation of the bridge for the next two decades, including toll collection, which will go towards paying back all the money borrowed for construction. Long Jian Road and Bridge, an infrastructure construction services company based in China, is the contractor on the Chinese side and began work on the project in late 2016 with it scheduled to be complete around October 2019.

Designing and Building the River Bridge

It was planned that the river bridge would be constructed incrementally. The bridge is constructed with composite beams manufactured from concrete reinforced with steel. This type of material combines the advantages of both steel and concrete in a single element. With temperature variations in mind, steel bolts and steel girders are being used with the main bridge pier being protected by composite material coated in steel. Another part of the design phase was to the minimization of material losses, keeping maintenance costs as low as possible. To ensure this, it was decided that weathering steel would be used for the bridge tower as well as the main beam.

Further cost-saving methods employed were the use of reinforced concrete technology to form the foundation of the beam. When constructing the side-span steel beam and the main bridge, the construction teams used multi-point pushing technology. Care was also taken to ensure that neither the design nor the construction of the bridge would have a negative impact on the delicate ecosystem of the Heilongjiang River.

Advanced Software Used in the Project

The construction of the Heihe-Blagoveshchensk-Heilongjiang highway bridge relied on innovative technology from Bentley that uses 5D building information modelling (BIM). The team used Bentley ProjectWise software suite to collaborate on architecture, engineering, and construction throughout the design face in order to model the bridge together, share information, and manage the construction. The Bentley ProStructures software suite was used to design the concrete and steel structure with the goal of saving time and material and thus increasing efficiency. ContextCapture software was used for the modeling of the digital terrain and the overall planning of the site. Other software used included MicroStation, LumenRT, AECOsim, Descartes, RM Bridge, Navigator, ProSteel, OpenRoads, and OpenBridge Modeler.

Advantages of the Connection Between Russia and China

The Heihe-Blagoveshchensk-Heilongjiang highway bridge will improve trade between Russia, China, and Mongolia. It will bolster this economic corridor as well as enhance the potential of the Silk Road Economic Belt. Once opened, the trade route will be shortened by some 3,500 kilometers. The bridge is planned to accommodate close to 1.5 million passengers within a year of its opening. This is approximately triple the current passenger volume. It is anticipated that freight shipments will increase to around three million tons, which is roughly ten times the current capability. It is also expected that the capacity of trade between Russia and China, which is currently over $100 billion, will drastically increase.