Where Is the Longest Bridge in the World?

With the Guinness World Record to prove it, the Danyang-Kunshan Grand Bridge in the Jiangsu province of China is officially the world’s longest bridge with a breathtaking length of over 102 miles — or about twenty times as long as The Las Vegas Strip. Holding the record since June 2011, this viaduct-type bridge makes up part of the Beijing-Shanghai high-speed railway and took 10,000 workers just four years to make — from 2006 to 2010. The bridge required 450,000 tons of steel and cost around $8.5 billion to build. Two Record-breaking Bridges In One The Danyang-Kunshan Grand Bridge is so long that it even houses the world’s second-largest bridge within it. A subsection of the bridge, which is also its railway section, the Langfang–Qingxian viaduct or the Tianjin Grand Bridge, is 70.8 miles long and its train line goes between Shanghai and Nanjing in Jiangsu. Designed and built by the China Road and Bridge Corporation (CRBC) to solve the problem of the area’s railway traffic by allowing trains to travel at a great distance, this bridge has successfully provided travelers with the ability to chop 2.5 hours off the time it used to take to travel from Ningbo to Jiaxing. Though most of the bridge follows the Yangtze River, a 5.6-mile section of it stretches across Yangcheng Lake’s open waters, remaining sturdy with the help of steel cables and 2,000 support pillars. Designed by engineers to be able to withstand a host of natural disasters like typhoons and a magnitude 8 earthquake, the bridge has also survived a 300,000-ton naval vessel crashing directly into it.