Construction of the final deck for the railroad bridge over the Amur River to the Chinese city of Tongjiang will be finished next month, according to the government of Russia’s Jewish Autonomous Region.
It will be part of the long-awaited infrastructure, which is aimed at connecting Russia’s Far East with China’s northernmost Heilongjiang province.
The 2,209-meter-long Nizhneleninskoe (Jewish Autonomous Region) to Tongjiang (Heilongjiang province) bridge will become the first railway bridge between the two countries. China has already completed the construction of its part of the bridge.
Russia plans to export iron ore, coal, mineral fertilizers, lumber, and other goods via the railway infrastructure to China.
Construction of the cross-border bridge between Russia and China officially started in 2016, following 28 years of negotiations. The new bridge and its associated infrastructure will cost more than $300 million and will be 19.9km long. Some 6.5km of the bridge and road junctions will lie in China, and the remaining 13.5km will be located in Russia, according to China’s CNS agency. The length of the main suspension bridge will be roughly 1,300 meters and its width will be 14.5 meters.
The highway section of the bridge will be ready for traffic this year. Traffic capacity is expected to exceed three million tons of cargo, and will reach 1.48 million people a year by 2020.
The bridge will greatly facilitate trade between the two countries, since the route will be roughly 3,500km shorter than current journeys. By 2020, cargo turnover is expected to increase 10-fold, from 300,000 to three million metric tons.
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