The Yichang-Wanzhou railway in southwest China is expected to be open to traffic in mid-to-late November, said a local government website. By then, it will only take about eight hours to travel from Wuhan to Chongqing.

An inspection of the main electrification engineering of the railway started on 11 October.

The 377km-long Yichang-Wanzhou railway has taken seven years to construct due to the large number of tunnels and bridges that needed to be built. The total cost was Rmb22.7bn.