Construction work on more than 90 percent of the Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport MRT line was finished last month, meaning that it is on track to begin operating in 2015, the Bureau of High Speed Rail (BHSR) said yesterday.
The MRT line was originally scheduled to start operating this month, but construction was delayed due to contract disputes between the project’s turn-key contractor, sub-contractors and equipment suppliers, as well as setbacks installing signal cables.
“Most of the facilities will be finished this year, so the trains can start test runs early next year. All the test runs should be finished by the end of next year and the line is expected to meet the conditions for operation by 2015,” Bureau Deputy Director-General Chang Wu-Hsun (張武訓) said yesterday.
The bureau said that the signal cable installation began in June and has been completed on the line from the A14 station to the A21 station. The cables are currently being installed at the stations on the northern section of the line.
The rail tracks between the A2 and A21 stations were all connected by the end of last year, while work on the electricity supply between these stations was finished in July this year, the bureau said.
It added that 6.6km of track has been laid down between the A2 station and Taipei Railway Station, with the section scheduled to be completed by May next year.
Moreover, all 28 trains for the line arrived at the Cingpu Depot (青埔) in June, so static testing is already being conducted between the A17 and A21 stations, with dynamic testing procedures set to begin in mid-January next year, bureau officials said.
Saying that 90.34 percent of the project had been completed by the end of last month, the bureau said it is confident that the Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport MRT line can be opened by 2015.
The bureau added that it will also seek compensation from the project’s contractors for not completing their work on time. The contractors may face a fine of NT$12.5 million (US$421,000) per day for each day that has passed since the original deadline of Friday last week.
The MRT line will be 51.03km long when completed and stretch from Taipei Railway Station to Huanbei Station (環北站) in Taoyuan County’s Jhongli (中壢). It will pass through the airport and Taiwan High Speed Rail Corp’s Taoyuan Station, and will have a total of 22 stations.
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