Chongqing East: World's Largest Rail Station Built on Mountaintop

Chongqing. Located in Chongqing in southwestern China, the world's largest rail station 'Chongqing East' stands as a wonderful marvel in the field of modern infrastructure construction.

Six times larger than Grand Central Station in New York, USA, and 15 times larger than Europe's largest rail station, Leipzig Hauptbahnhof in Germany, this station occupies more area than some small cities.

In fact, this station is more than twice the size of the total area of Vatican City, the world's smallest country located in Rome, Italy. Chongqing East has 29 platforms and 15 railway tracks, and its upper part is covered with a giant steel tube truss roof weighing 16,500 tons.

Spread over eight floors, the station's 400-meter-long platforms are designed to accommodate up to 16,000 passengers per hour during peak times and China's longest high-speed bullet trains.

The most impressive aspect of this world's largest rail station is that it has been built on the summit of a mountain. Chongqing city is famous for its sloped and hilly terrain, due to which this place was considered the least suitable for building such a large transportation hub compared to other big cities in China.

However, with technical knowledge, modern technology, strong ambition, and a large number of workers available, this project presents an example that even difficult terrains cannot stop development. According to Xinhua News Agency, workers initially removed a large mountain by cutting and blasting it to create a flat ground for construction before building this giant rail station.

Approximately 2 million cubic meters of concrete and about 366,000 tons of steel have been used to build this incomparable transportation hub. A large contingent of over 40,000 human workers and robotic machinery was mobilized for its construction. It took only 38 months to complete the construction of the Chongqing East Rail Station, which has such a large and complex structure.

In a context where most countries in the world take more time than this just to get the necessary permits and approvals for such large projects, completing the construction in such a short period is considered a great achievement.