How Chinese Engineers Moved A 5-Storey Bus Terminal To A New Location (Video)

Chinese engineers in April 2019 successfully move a 30,000-tonne bus station to a new location without dismantling the structure.

The 5-Storey Houxi Long Distance Bus Station was moved to make way for a new high-speed railway station.


The lifting and movement of the structure, the weight of roughly 170 Boeing 747s aircrafts or 2 Brooklyn Bridges, took 40 days to complete.











The relocated Houxi Long Distance Bus Station has three storeys above the ground and two underneath. It was opened to the public in 2015 after five years of construction.

Instead of destroying the 4 year old £30 million (₦13.9 billion) structure, see what the engineers did:











To relocate the massive 30,000-tonne structure whole, workers put hundreds of hydraulic jacks under it and laid rolling tracks for it to slide along. The building measures 162 metres (531 feet) long and 33.6 metres (110 feet) wide. The far side would need to slide along the ground for as far as 288 metres (945 feet) to help the building reach the destination.

Prior to the move, workers had dug into the ground and remove the soil between the building's original location and the new location. The also put railings along the ground in the fan-shaped area. Then they lifted the building off the ground and put 532 hydraulic jacks underneath. Those are special hydraulic jacks that can move forwards automatically after pushing the structure up, bringing the building with them. The hydraulic jacks were divided into two groups, both controlled by computers. The first group would rise, 'step' forwards and go down before the second group repeat the same motions. This would create a visual illusion that the building had been 'walking'. The hydraulic jacks worked 24 hours without a stop and the bus terminal was pushed forwards for 10 to 20 metres (32.8 to 65.6 feet) a day.

The ambitious move was carried out to make room for a new high-speed railway project.






Wei Xinhai, project leader of the Xiamen Port Construction Co, said,

“The first goal was to ensure the safety of the original structure,”

“The second goal was to meet the construction schedule of the Fuzhou-Xiamen high-speed railway, which has been put on track,”

He added that despite the horizontal rotation of 90 degrees, not even a single piece of glass in the bus station was damaged.










On September 6, 2019, this amazing feat was awarded a Guinness World Record for the longest arc rotation of a pivoted building.

Watch Video Here 👇