CHENGDU -- A high-speed railway in western China has won the award of FIDIC Outstanding Project of the Year, its design company said Thursday.

The 658-km-long railway that links Xi'an, the capital city of Northwest China's Shaanxi province, and Chengdu city, the capital of Southwest China's Sichuan province, was opened to traffic in 2017.

The railway, running through the Qinling Mountains, a natural boundary between the country's north and south, helps reduce the travel time between the cities to three hours from 16 hours. It can transport 100,000 passengers at most per day.

The award is praised as the Nobel Prize of the engineering industry, which is given by the International Federation of Consulting Engineers (FIDIC).