Tongjiang-Nizhneleninskoye railway bridge (Amur River Bridge) is an international Sino-Russian railroad bridge linking Nizhneleninskoye (in Russian: Нижнеленинское) in the Jewish Autonomous Oblast with Tongjiang (in Chinese: 同江) in Heilongjiang Province.
A major use of the bridge will be to transport iron ore from the Kimkan open-pit mine in the Jewish Autonomous Oblast that is owned by IRC Limited, which is partly owned by Petropavlovsk plc.[1][2] Petropavlovsk plc will participate in financing the bridge's construction.[1] The bridge is expected to transport more than 3 million metric tons of cargo and 1.5 million passengers per year.[3]
In 1995, China and Russia signed an agreement to build a bridge across the Amur and Ussuri rivers.
The bridge was first proposed in 2007 by Valery Solomonovich Gurevich, the vice-chairman of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast.[4] Gurevich said that the proposal to construct a bridge across the river was first suggested by the Russian side, in view of growing cargo transportation demands.
In 2013, the transport ministries of Russia and China signed a general construction agreement.[5] During President Putin's visit to China in May 2014, another agreement about the construction of the bridge was signed by Russian and Chinese officials.[6] In September 2014, Russia and China founded a joint company which will control the process of building the bridge.[7]
In November 2014, the local Russian media reported that a significant amount of the construction work had been carried out on the Chinese part of the bridge, but hardly anything had been done on the Russian part.[8] In June 2016, the Russian government selected SK Most Group, a well-connected private Russian company led by Ruslan Baisarov, to work on the project.[9]
By July 2016, the Chinese portion of the bridge was finished but work had not started on the much shorter Russian portion.[9]
In December 2016, work began on the Russian portion of the bridge.[citation needed]
Completion of structural link between the two sides of the bridge was completed in March 2019.[10][11] Opening of rail traffic has been repeatedly delayed, with the December 2019 estimate being "the end of 2020",[12] and then 3rd quarter of 2021.[13] The bridge was finally completed on August 17, 2021.[14] First Russian commercial train entered China on November 16, 2022.[15]
The bridge was designed by Russia's Giprostroymost institute, satisfying both Russian and Chinese standards. In 2014, it was reported that the main structure over the Amur River runs north-south and will consist of 20 110-meter steel through-truss spans. The bridge will have both a standard gauge (1435 mm) track and a Russian gauge (1520 mm) track. However, the two tracks will be offset by only 800 mm, so that only one track can be used at any given time.[16]
