On December 29, 2021, China's first expressway across the hinterland of the desert, the Qingtongxia-Zhongwei section of the Uma Expressway, jointly built by the China Railway 18th Bureau Group and China Railway 23rd Bureau Group, was officially opened to traffic.

The Qingtongxia-Zhongwei section of the Wuma Expressway officially started construction in April 2019. The main line of the project is 122.9 kilometers long. About 18 kilometers of the road runs through the hinterland of the Tengger Desert. The connecting line runs from north to south and crosses the Yellow River. 9.63 kilometers. The entire line adopts two-way four-lane highway standards, with a design speed of 100 kilometers per hour, a roadbed width of 26 meters, and a total project investment of about 7.94 billion yuan.

The bid section undertaken by the China Railway 18th Bureau Group includes civil engineering and pavement projects. The total length of the line is about 9 kilometers. Among them, the overpass of the Baolan Railway is a major and difficult control project. Due to the long construction line and close to the Yellow River, during the construction, the project construction team overcomes many technical problems such as complex and diverse foundations, abundant groundwater resources, and difficulty in handling the back of the platform, and solved the local seasonal storms, rain and fog, heavy snow and frost and other severe weather The unfavorable factors that interfered with the construction completed the construction task with high quality and high efficiency, and finally achieved the goal of opening to traffic 17 months earlier than the planned construction period.

The Wuma Expressway is a key highway project under the 13th Five-Year Plan of the State and Ningxia Autonomous Region. It is a major north-south transportation corridor in Ningxia. The development of the western region is of great practical significance to promote regional economic and social development. After the completion and opening to traffic, the journey between Yinchuan and Zhongwei was reduced from two and a half hours to one and a half hours. This not only can effectively divert the traffic volume of the Beijing-Tibet Expressway and ease the traffic pressure on the road network in Ningxia, but also open up the northwestern capital cities of Lanzhou and Yinchuan. The second high-speed channel.Editor/Ma Xue