On September 5, employees of China Railway 11th Bureau drove a large track-laying unit to smoothly lay a pair of 500-meter-long steel rails on the ballastless track plate in Zaoyang City. The Wuhan-Shiyan high-speed railway, known as the "most beautiful high-speed railway line in Hubei", officially started track laying construction.

The Wuhan-Shiyan High-speed Railway is the railway project with the largest investment, highest standards and longest mileage in Hubei Province. It is an important part of the Wuhan-Xi'an High-speed Railway. It starts from the Xiaogan East Station of the Wuhan-Xiaogan Intercity Railway, passes through Suizhou and Xiangyang to Shiyan. The total length of the line is 399 kilometers, with a designed speed of 350 kilometers per hour. China Railway 11th Bureau Group is responsible for the track laying construction of the entire line. It is planned to complete the track laying construction in April 2019 and open to traffic in December 2019. The Wuhan-Shiyan High-Speed Railway is an important part of the Wuhan-Xi'an National High-Speed Railway. It is not only an important regional rapid railway connecting Wuhan, Shiyan and Suizhou in Hubei Province, but will also be a national strategic channel connecting Central China with the Northwest region and the southeast coast. The line connects to the Wuhan hub in the east, and connects to Wuhan, Changsha and South China through the Beijing-Guangzhou Passenger Dedicated Line, and connects to East China through the Wuhan-Jiujiang Passenger Dedicated Line under construction; in the long term, it will connect to the Xi'an hub in the west, and radiate to the Northwest through the Xuzhou-Lanzhou Passenger Dedicated Line and the Yinchuan-Xi'an High-speed Railway; in the middle, it connects to the Zhengzhou-Wanzhou Passenger Dedicated Line, connecting Henan, North China and Southwest China, and is an important part of the central and western passenger dedicated lines.

New High-power Push-type Track Laying Machine for Laying Tracks on Wuhan-Shiyan High-speed Railway.This device adopts new technology to push steel rails in difficult sections (slope up to 20‰ with curves).

The Wuhan-Shiyan High-Speed Railway adopts 60kg/m steel rails and is designed to lay seamless tracks across sections in one go. The track structure is CRTS Ⅰ double-block ballastless track, and the turnout area adopts sleeper-embedded ballastless track. According to Zhou Bin, manager of the Laying and Erection Division of the Wuhan-Shiyan High-Speed Railway of China Railway 11th Bureau Group, there are a total of 238 sets of turnouts on the entire line. In order to meet the needs of high-speed railway operation, 4 sets of them use the No.42 large number high-speed turnouts, which have high technical content and complex construction process, and have higher requirements on the accuracy and durability of the turnout's geometric shape and position. To this end, they have continuously carried out technological innovation on the basis of previous construction, and perfected a set of construction methods with mature technology and advanced processes. By adopting a comprehensive horizontal and vertical adjustment and positioning system, they can accurately locate the geometric dimensions of the turnout frame, thereby ensuring that the quality pass rate of the turnout construction reaches 100%. The WZ500C track-laying unit used for track laying on the Wuhan-Shiyan High-Speed Railway is a special track-laying machine for ballastless tracks independently developed and produced in China. It can lay up to 9 km of track per day. The track laying of the Wuhan-Shiyan High-Speed Railway from Xiangyang to Xiaogan East section can be completed in just 3 months. In order to ensure the safe, high-quality and efficient completion of the Wuhan-Shiyan High-Speed Railway track laying project, China Railway 11th Bureau introduced the railway engineering safety dispatching and management system, which is a comprehensive safety dispatching and management platform that integrates multiple functions such as vehicle safety management, video monitoring, remote dispatching, real-time communication, data collection and collation. During use, long-distance real-time monitoring and real-time communication are realized, safety hazards are discovered more promptly, and they are dealt with more quickly, thereby greatly reducing construction risks. At the same time, this platform can intuitively monitor project progress, draw train operation diagrams, send and receive and query dispatch orders, issue construction plans, and realize personnel management, vehicle storage management, mobile office and other functions.