Abstract: Shengli tunnel in Tianshan is an extra-long road tunnel in an extremely cold area with high altitude and geostress, thus it is critical for the whole railway line and difficult to meet the requirements of construction safety, period and environment protection by traditional drill and blast method. Based on a contrastive analysis of the four construction schemes in terms of construction period, economy, safety and quality control, a three-tube scheme, in which the main tunnel tubes use drill and blast method and the parallel pilot tunnel uses TBM, is determined,achieving the goal of being economic, reasonable, safe, reliable, and shortening of construction period.