More than 1,000 railway passengers were delayed yesterday due to problems with the electric wires at Fonglin Station (鳳林).
The incident has happened less than one month after the Taiwan Railways Administration (TRA) launched services on its electrified railway line between Hualien and Taitung.
It was also the second incident this week in which the trains have been delayed because of an electric wiring problem.
According to the administration, the incident happened at 12:22pm in the afternoon, when a commuter train heading from Hualien City to Yuli (玉里) in Hualien County found that the electric wires at Fonglin Station were out of order. The problem forced the train operator to deploy diesel-powered locomotives to continue two-way operations using only one railway line in the section between the county’s Wanrong (萬榮) and Nanping (南平).
The TRA said it managed to resume electrified service on two railway lines at 2:55pm. In total, the incident affected eight trains and delayed approximately 1,200 passengers.
Among them, only about 350 qualified for a full refund of their tickets because the three express trains they were on had been delayed by more than 45 minutes.
A preliminary investigation found that the electric wires were intact, but the pantograph — the device on the roof of an electric train that collects power through contact with the track’s overhead wire — appeared to have gotten wedged in the wires. The maintenance crew freed the wedged pantograph to enable electricity to resume flowing on the railway line.
A similar incident happened on Monday afternoon, when a commuter train from Keelung to Miaoli was forced to stop operation because of broken electric wires in the section between Songshan (松山) and Taipei. Nearly 20,000 passengers were affected by the incident, with approximately 4,500 qualifying for a full refund of the fare.
The administration said that the causes of both incidents will be investigated by its operation safety committee.
Meanwhile, Minister of Transportation and Communications Yeh Kuang-shih (葉匡時) apologized for Monday’s delays, adding that the TRA has been asked to review the maintenance procedures for the electric wires, as well as regulations governing train ticket refunds.
In other developments, the TRA said that all of its long-distance train services are to be equipped with nurseries by the end of next year.
Currently, about 70 percent of its long or medium-distance express trains offer such facilities to allow mothers to breastfeed their children without any interference.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods