The first high-speed railroad in Southeast Asia, the Jakarta-Bandung High-Speed Railway, started trail operation during the Group of Twenty (G20) Leaders' Summit held in Bali, Indonesia, from November 15 to 16. The passage time from Jakarta to Bandung will be reduced from more than 3 hours to 40 minutes.

The Jakarta-Bandung High-Speed Railway is the first time for a high-speed railway with Chinese technical standards as well as survey and design, engineering construction, equipment manufacturing, material supply, operation management and personnel training by the Chinese side to go global. Among them, the 13.19-meter-diameter tunnel boring machine independently developed by CCCC, which is also the tunnel boring machine with the largest diameter exported from China ever, plays an important role in the construction of Tunnel 1 of the Jakarta-Bandung High-Speed Railway.

Unveiling ceremony of the tunnel boring machine (TBM) for the Tunnel 1 of the Jakarta-Bandung High-Speed Railway

The Tunnel 1 of the Jakarta-Bandung High-Speed Railway is 1,885 meters long and the maximum burial depth is 26 meters, which is the "throat" of the whole project and the first high-speed rail shield tunnel constructed by Chinese enterprises overseas.

Facing the complex construction environment of Tunnel 1, CCCC's TBM applied many advanced technologies in the world, such as settlement control, extra-long distance tunneling without cutter change for extra-large diameter TBM and real-time monitoring of cutter wear, among which the last two are first used in the world. The maximum settlement control is at millimeter level, which is the first time in the history of TBM tunneling with a large diameter.

The project team also set a record of tunneling 320 meters in a single month and trained more than one hundred TBM technicians.

The Jakarta-Bandung High-Speed Railway connects Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, and Bandung, the fourth largest city, with a total length of 142 kilometers and a design speed of 350 kilometers per hour. The completion of the project is of great importance to speed up the construction of the Pan-Asian Railway, boost the Jakarta-Bandung Economic Corridor and promote the economic and social development of Indonesia.