The Taiwan High Speed Rail Corp (THSRC) encountered its first setback during mandated test runs when one of its trains was forced to stop for two hours on Tuesday night owing to an abnormality detected in a railway track switching system.
At the request of the official inspection committee, the THSRC began another round of test runs this week. Fifteen trains are being tested.
Bureau of High Speed Rail Director-General Wu Fu-hsiang (吳福祥) said Tuesday's incident occurred when a train was conducted back and forth many times between platforms and the maintenance area.
On one occasion when the train's driver attempted to conduct the vehicle to the maintenance area, it was unable to move because its track switching system displayed a warning signal.
The operation was eventually completed at 11:30pm.
"This shows that the signaling system functioned properly [under the circumstances]," Wu said.
He added that the warning signal could have been triggered by a railway switch that had not returned to its proper position.
Why a switch might have failed to do so remains unknown, he said.
Vice Minister of Transportation and Communications Ho Nuan-hsuen (
He said that staff at the Taiwan Railway Administration, for example, did not have to brief him whenever there was a delay with their train services.
The inspection committee had ruled that if any accidents occurred during the latest round of tests they would have to start from scratch.
Ho said, however, that the ministry would determine what constituted an "accident" based on traffic regulations.
"Since no major accident occurred as a result of this technical problem, the scheduled high speed rail test runs do not have to start again from the beginning," Ho said.
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
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
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