The Beijing new airport subway line will be the fastest urban transit project in the Chinese mainland with a top speed of 160 kilometers per hour, said Jiang Chuanzhi, the architect in charge of designing the new airport subway line.
It will take only 19 minutes to travel from the South 3rd Ring in Beijing to the terminals at the new airport, when the line is put into service together with the opening of the airport in 2019.
The first beam of the subway line was raised at the construction site of Lixian Town, Daxing District, on Nov. 6. The construction of the frame structure is estimated to complete by June 2018.
According to Jiang, the first phase of subway line construction is 41.36 kilometers in length, including the shield section and the elevated section. The line runs through Daxing District and Fengtai District, stopping at three stations including the New Airport North Terminal Station, the Cigezhuang Station, and the Caoqiao Station.
Jiang said that the shield section is about 16.2 kilometers in length and located outside the 6th Ring Road in Daxing District. The construction project will last until June 30, 2018.
The planning for the line's construction involved various new techniques used to build models of the subway line with considerations to environmental protection.
The shield section project will go though the sandy cobble ground, crossing the Daxing Subway Line, the Jing-Hu railway, highways, bridges, rivers, high voltage electricity towers, the water-conveyance tunnel in the South-to-North Water Transfer Project, and residential areas.
According to reports, there are long term plans for three subway lines to connect to the new airport. Among them, the new airport subway line is exclusively built to serve the new airport. It is also the first rail transit constructed and operated under the public private partnership (PPP) model. The total investment for the first phase of the new airport subway line is about 29.26 billion yuan (US$4.41 billion), including 14.9 billion yuan in private capital.