Stunned by China’s engineering marvel? Elon Musk shares post of world’s biggest train station built near Beijing in 2 years

Tesla CEO Elon Musk seems to be impressed with China's manufacturing prowess after he visited Beijing along with US President Donald Trump. Musk's appreciation of China's development is reflected in his social media post of the biggest train station on the top of a mountain covering 475,200 m².

In a post on X, Elon Musk shared a video of the Chongqing East Station, which is built near Beijing. The clip shows the aerial view and interior views of the structure, claiming in the voiceover that the station was built in 38 months with the help of more than 14,0000 workers.

China's massive $7.8 billion high-speed rail megaproject now stands as the largest railway hub in the world as it spans an immense 1.22 million square metres. The megaproject features a distinct 16,500-tonne steel tube truss roof. Engineers utilised a unique sliding assembly method, choosing to build the entire 16,500-tonne roof on the ground first before hydraulically sliding it 57 metres upward into its final position.

Supporting this massive roof are 41-metre tree-shaped "Huangjue" columns. These branching steel structures are modelled after the local Huangjue tree and are specifically designed for earthquake resistance. Once the roof was elevated, workers executed the complex installation of stainless steel cladding at a height of 57 metres directly above the mountain slope.

A new global transit hub

With its completion, Chongqing East Station takes the title of the largest railway hub in the world. The mega-station is built to anchor a vast high-speed rail network, seamlessly connecting Southwest China to 14 major cities across the country.

The project was considered the first major infrastructure project of the new area, created to accommodate non-essential functions of Beijing and strengthen regional integration between Beijing, Tianjin, and Hebei. The station is part of the Beijing-Xiong’an intercity railway, with about 91 km to 92.79 km in length, and was designed for a maximum speed of 350 km/h.

With the operation, the journey between Beijing and Xiong’an has been reduced to about 50 minutes. The travel between Xiong’an and Beijing Daxing International Airport now takes about 19 minutes.

Musk's Tesla Gigafactory in Shanghai

Interestingly, Elon Musk built his largest factory outside of the United States in China, which officially completed its initial phase of construction and opened in December 2019. The plant broke ground in January 2019, taking just under a year, a record-breaking 168 working days, to go from raw permits to a finished, operational manufacturing facility.

The Tesla Gigafactory in Shanghai (often referred to as Gigafactory 3) is a massive $2 billion facility capable of producing around 1 million electric vehicles annually.