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.
Kenting National Park service technician Yang Jien-fon (楊政峰) won a silver award in World Grand Prix Photography Awards Spring Season for his photograph of two male rat snakes intertwined in combat. Yang’s colleagues at Kenting National Park said he is a master of nature photography who has been held back by his job in civil service. The awards accept entries in all four seasons across six categories: architectural and urban photography, black-and-white and fine art photography, commercial and fashion photography, documentary and people photography, nature and experimental photography, and mobile photography. Awards are ranked according to scores and divided into platinum, gold and
More than half of the bamboo vipers captured in Tainan in the past few years were found in the city’s Sinhua District (新化), while other districts had smaller catches or none at all. Every year, Tainan captures about 6,000 snakes which have made their way into people’s homes. Of the six major venomous snakes in Taiwan, the cobra, the many-banded krait, the brown-spotted pit viper and the bamboo viper are the most frequently captured. The high concentration of bamboo vipers captured in Sinhua District is puzzling. Tainan Agriculture Bureau Forestry and Nature Conservation Division head Chu Chien-ming (朱健明) earlier this week said that the
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