A woman was yesterday fatally struck by a Puyuma Express train at the Miaoli Railway Station in an apparent suicide, the Taiwan Railways Administration said.
The incident, which occurred at 10:23am, halted train services along the route for nearly an hour and affected 700 passengers, the agency said.
The Puyuma Express No. 110 train was bound for Nangang Station in Taipei when it hit the woman and tossed her body to the southbound track, it said.
Photo: Chang Hsun-teng, Taipei Times
Sources said the woman, surnamed Chen (陳), was 38 years old and had disabilities.
An eyewitness, surnamed Lin (林), said Chen had been sitting on a bench on the platform looking downcast and jumped onto the tracks as the train approached the station.
Police said a preliminary investigation found that Chen suffered from moderate depression, but they have yet to determine why she might have committed suicide.
Photo: Chang Hsun-teng, Taipei Times
Train services resumed at 11:15am after police had examined the scene and collected potential evidence, the agency added.
Separately, two vehicles crashed at 12:15pm yesterday on the southbound lane of the Sun Yat-sen Freeway (Freeway No. 1) near the Jhubei (竹北) exit.
No one was injured and the lane was soon cleared for traffic, but the incident caused congestion in the 5km leading up to the exit.
Other sections of freeways that saw traffic congestion included the southbound lanes of the Sun Yat-sen Freeway between Hukou (湖口) and Hsinchu; on the Formosa Freeway (Freeway No. 3) between the Guansi Service Area and Guansi (關西), between Ciedong (茄苳) and Siangshan (香山), and between Dasi (大溪) and Longtan (龍潭); as well as on the Chiang Wei-shui Freeway (Freeway No. 5) between Nangang (南港) and Shihding (石碇).
Despite some congestion, driving speed along most parts of the freeways was at least 60kph, National Freeway Bureau Traffic Management Division director Hsu Fu-shen (徐福聲) said, adding that traffic is expected to spike this morning — the first day of the Lunar New Year.
Throughout the six-day holiday, the bureau is carrying out traffic control measures along 45 congestion-prone sections on freeways and provincial highways, as well as 10 major tourist attractions, the bureau said.
The bureau would also increase the number of long-distance buses depending on the traffic situation and offer discounted bus tickets to encourage people to use public transportation, it added.
Real-time information about the traffic on national highways is available on the bureau’s 1968 Web site and its smartphone app.
Meanwhile, passenger traffic at Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport yesterday was estimated at 117,043 — which was 13,000 fewer than last year.
Of the 117,043 passengers, 59,012 were departures and 55,350 were arrivals, the airport said.
Although the numbers were surprisingly low, the airport expects to see more than 130,000 passengers departing today.
Additional reporting by Ann Maxon
NO RECIPROCITY: Taipei has called for cross-strait group travel to resume fully, but Beijing is only allowing people from its Fujian Province to travel to Matsu, the MAC said The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday criticized an announcement by the Chinese Ministry of Culture and Tourism that it would lift a travel ban to Taiwan only for residents of China’s Fujian Province, saying that the policy does not meet the principles of reciprocity and openness. Chinese Deputy Minister of Culture and Tourism Rao Quan (饒權) yesterday morning told a delegation of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers in a meeting in Beijing that the ministry would first allow Fujian residents to visit Lienchiang County (Matsu), adding that they would be able to travel to Taiwan proper directly once express ferry
STUMPED: KMT and TPP lawmakers approved a resolution to suspend the rate hike, which the government said was unavoidable in view of rising global energy costs The Ministry of Economic Affairs yesterday said it has a mandate to raise electricity prices as planned after the legislature passed a non-binding resolution along partisan lines to freeze rates. Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers proposed the resolution to suspend the price hike, which passed by a 59-50 vote. The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) voted with the KMT. Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) of the KMT said the resolution is a mandate for the “immediate suspension of electricity price hikes” and for the Executive Yuan to review its energy policy and propose supplementary measures. A government-organized electricity price evaluation board in March
FAST RELEASE: The council lauded the developer for completing model testing in only four days and releasing a commercial version for use by academia and industry The National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) yesterday released the latest artificial intelligence (AI) language model in traditional Chinese embedded with Taiwanese cultural values. The council launched the Trustworthy AI Dialogue Engine (TAIDE) program in April last year to develop and train traditional Chinese-language models based on LLaMA, the open-source AI language model released by Meta. The program aims to tackle the information bias that is often present in international large-scale language models and take Taiwanese culture and values into consideration, it said. Llama 3-TAIDE-LX-8B-Chat-Alpha1, released yesterday, is the latest large language model in traditional Chinese. It was trained based on Meta’s Llama-3-8B
NOVEL METHODS: The PLA has adopted new approaches and recently conducted three combat readiness drills at night which included aircraft and ships, an official said Taiwan is monitoring China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) exercises for changes in their size or pattern as the nation prepares for president-elect William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20, National Security Bureau (NSB) Director-General Tsai Ming-yen (蔡明彥) said yesterday. Tsai made the comment at a meeting of the Legislative Yuan’s Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee, in response to Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Wang Ting-yu’s (王定宇) questions. China continues to employ a carrot-and-stick approach, in which it applies pressure with “gray zone” tactics, while attempting to entice Taiwanese with perks, Tsai said. These actions aim to help Beijing look like it has