About 10,000 high speed-rail passengers faced delays on the second day of the 228 Memorial Day holiday due to an abnormality in the landslide detection system in a section of the railway in Taoyuan, the Taiwan High Speed Rail Corp said.
The company said that an alarm went off at 11:31am, forcing it to cancel train No. 1622.
Both the staff monitoring the movement of the slopes along the railway tracks from surveillance cameras and the security guards arriving at the site in which the alarm was sounded did not find anything abnormal at the scene, the company said.
To ensure the passengers’ safety, all trains passing through the section were ordered to slow down, the company said, adding that trains were delayed about 10 to 20 minutes.
The high-speed rail resumed normal operations at 2:07pm after the maintenance crew fixed the erroneous alert, the company said.
The incident affected a total of 19 trains, the company said, adding that an estimated 4,800 passengers were entitled to a refund of 50 percent of train fares.
None of the services were delayed more than one hour, the company added.
In other developments, passengers heading to the East Coast are to be able use EasyCards or other certified electronic tickets at any of the Taiwan Railways Administration’s (TRA) stations between Taipei and Hualien.
Currently, people traveling to the East Coast can only use EasyCards or other electronic tickets if their final destination is Suao in Yilan County.
The policy is to take effect at noon tomorrow, when multiple-card scanners in 11 railway stations between Suao (蘇澳) and Hualien Railway Station are to be activated.
The TRA said that 189 of its 225 railway stations would become accessible to electronic ticket users after the new policy takes effect, adding that it aims to have multiple-card scanners installed in all railway stations by June.
The scanners have yet to be available in the railway stations between Hualien and Taitung, and those between Taitung and Pintung.
A small number of Taiwanese this year lost their citizenship rights after traveling in China and obtaining a one-time Chinese passport to cross the border into Russia, a source said today. The people signed up through Chinese travel agencies for tours of neighboring Russia with companies claiming they could obtain Russian visas and fast-track border clearance, the source said on condition of anonymity. The travelers were actually issued one-time-use Chinese passports, they said. Taiwanese are prohibited from holding a Chinese passport or household registration. If found to have a Chinese ID, they may lose their resident status under Article 9-1
PROBLEMATIC APP: Citing more than 1,000 fraud cases, the government is taking the app down for a year, but opposition voices are calling it censorship Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) yesterday decried a government plan to suspend access to Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu (小紅書) for one year as censorship, while the Presidential Office backed the plan. The Ministry of the Interior on Thursday cited security risks and accusations that the Instagram-like app, known as Rednote in English, had figured in more than 1,700 fraud cases since last year. The company, which has about 3 million users in Taiwan, has not yet responded to requests for comment. “Many people online are already asking ‘How to climb over the firewall to access Xiaohongshu,’” Cheng posted on
Taiwanese were praised for their composure after a video filmed by Taiwanese tourists capturing the moment a magnitude 7.5 earthquake struck Japan’s Aomori Prefecture went viral on social media. The video shows a hotel room shaking violently amid Monday’s quake, with objects falling to the ground. Two Taiwanese began filming with their mobile phones, while two others held the sides of a TV to prevent it from falling. When the shaking stopped, the pair calmly took down the TV and laid it flat on a tatami mat, the video shows. The video also captured the group talking about the safety of their companions bathing
A magnitude 5.7 earthquake yesterday struck off the coast of Hualien, causing brief transportation disruptions in northern and eastern Taiwan, as authorities said that aftershocks of magnitude 5 or higher could occur over the next three days. The quake, which hit at 7:24pm at a depth of 24.5km, registered an intensity of 4 in Hualien and Nantou counties, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. There were no immediate reports of damage or injuries. In Taipei, the MRT railway’s operations control center received an earthquake alert and initiated standard safety procedures, briefly halting trains on the Bannan (blue) line for about a minute.
RSS