Thousands of residents in central China's Wuhan city gathered on Sunday to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the opening to traffic of the country's first railway-highway bridge across the Yangtze River.

Construction of the 1,670-meter-long Wuhan Yangtze River Bridge, located in the capital city of Hubei Province, started on September 1, 1955 and completed on October 15, 1957.

"The bridge has experienced hundreds of floods and more than 70 traffic collisions over the past five decades, but it stands still as before," said Zhao Yucheng, a retired engineer from the bridge section of China Railway Construction Corporation and also co-designer of the bridge.

"The bridge is very 'healthy' with its piers never moved and its girders never distorted and it is able to stands for another five decades," said Zhao.

The bridge has played a crucial role for transportation in central parts of the country across the Yangtze River, with 296 trains and tens of thousands of vehicles passing through it everyday, said the department of communication in Wuhan,

"The bridge has also become a symbol of Wuhan and receives thousands of visitors every year.

The 6,300-kilometre-long Yangtze River, also the third longest in the world, originates from the Tanggula Mountains in southwestern Qinghai Province, and flows through Tibet, Yunnan, Sichuan, Hubei, Hunan, Jiangxi, Anhui, Jiangsu and Shanghai, where it empties into the East China Sea.

The Yangtze River Delta area has become one of the economic powerhouses in China after rapid development in the last two decades.

Statistics with the China Railway Construction Corporation shows that by March 2005, 39 bridges had been erected over the Yangtze River and more bridges will be built in the future.

The total number of bridges across the Yangtze will reach 60 by 2010 and 100 by 2020, said the local transportation department.

(Xinhua News Agency October 15, 2007)