The Ministry of Transportation and Communications (MOTC) confirmed yesterday that the scheduled trial operations for the high speed railway would not start by the end of this month.
As the result, the delay may cause the Taiwan High Speed Rail Corp (THSRC) to shorten the length of some tests before it begins full operations by the end of October.
The trial operation period is listed as a requisite in the contract for the build-operate-transfer project and must be complete before the train can officially operate.
trial operations
Wu Fu-hsiang (吳福祥), the chief of the ministry's Bureau of High Speed rail, said yesterday the contract did not require the company to begin trial operations by a certain date, nor was the same requirement listed in the Railway Act (鐵路法).
According to Wu, about 97 percent of the high-speed rail construction was complete by last month. In the meantime, the company has finished testing at 300kph on the track between Tsoying (
Yesterday, the company conducted further tests inside the tunnel near Banciao station at an operational speed of 120kph.
THSRC's spokesman Arthur Chiang (江金山), speaking after the company recently secured a loan of NT$67 billion (US$2.09 billion), said that the trial operations were scheduled to begin by the end of this month and would last two months.
Chiang said that the trains would not carry any passengers during the trial operations. Rather, the company's employees would begin their routine work, including train operations, passenger service and train and railway track maintenance.
By doing so the company can test the safety and reliability of the system in a real-time setting, he said.
It also planned to announce the bullet train schedules as well as the ticket price before October, he said.
Former MOTC minister Kuo Yao-chi (
promise
Tsai Duei, who succeeded Kuo as minister last week, also said he would do everything he could to fulfill the promise.
The ministry began evaluating the stability of the high speed railway system near the end of July and convened a meeting last Wednesday to review the results.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater