The transport capacity of the railway line between Hualien and Fonglin (鳳林) is to be increased after the section between Shoufeng (壽豐) and Nanping (南平) is converted into a double-track system in mid-September, the Railway Reconstruction Bureau said.
Huang Feng-kang (黃鳳岡), director of the bureau’s east region engineering office, said that although the Hualien-Taitung line had been electrified on June 28 last year, the railway line remains a single-track system, which means that northbound and southbound trains have to share the use of one line.
If there are two trains on the track heading in opposite directions, one of them has to wait in a train station and let the other train pass before it can proceed, he said.
Huang said that the transport capacity for the railway line between Hualien and Fonglin could be increased by more than 4 percent with a double-track system between Shoufeng and Nanping, with daily train services increasing from 95 to 99.
Currently, about eight to nine trains each day have to wait three to five minutes at the stations for other trains to pass before they can continue through the section.
The Taiwan Railway Administration (TRA) said it would need to change the train timetable after the double-track system between Shoufeng and Nanping becomes operational, adding that it would still need to wait for railway construction between Pintung and Chaojhou (潮州) as well as an overpass railway project in Taichung to be finished, before any timetable changes could be made.
Huang said that the bureau has planned to convert four bottleneck sections into double-track systems and that the Shoufeng-Nanping section is one of three that are already completed. The bureau has yet to finish the construction of the Zihciang Tunnel (自強隧道).
Bureau Director-General Wu Sheng-yuan (伍勝園) said that the bureau is looking at eventually installing double-track systems along the rest of the Hualien-Taitung Line, a distance of about 121km.
Research on the viability of such a project is scheduled to be delivered by the end of this year, he said.
Currently, the double-track system only accounts for a quarter of the Hualien-Taitung Line.
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