The Taiwan High Speed Rail Corp (THSRC) yesterday signed a memorandum of understanding with the Central Weather Bureau, agreeing to study the possibility of building an earthquake warning system to prevent train derailments when an earthquake strikes the nation.
Also, the bureau is to provide information on typhoons to the rail company before issuing a sea alert.
Bureau of High Speed Rail (BHSR) Director-General Allen Hu (胡湘麟) said the high-speed rail in Taiwan has the same operating system as the Shinkansen network operated by Japan Railway Groups.
Hu said that the BHSR has already installed earthquake sensors along the nation’s high-speed railways to detect earthquakes and reduce possible damage to the system.
The sensors were triggered when a magnitude 6.4 earthquake struck Jiasian (甲仙) in Kaohsiung in 2010, lowering the quake’s impact on the rail system, Hu said.
He said that six trains were forced to halt operations due to the 2010 earthquake, but only one of them was derailed, adding that four of them were traveling at 300kph when the earthquake struck.
Hu said that the weather bureau has also been working to build an earthquake warning system, which is of comparable quality with the system developed in Japan.
He said that the rail company and the weather bureau can work together to improve the train safety operations when an earthquake hits the nation.
The BHSR said that if an earthquake hits 200km from the high-speed rail, the system would assess if the lateral force brought by the quake would require the slowing down or cessation of operations. The operator would have about 10 seconds to slow down or stop the train, the BHSR said.
The BHSR said that one of the challenges of building such a system is that it requires a large database to assess earthquakes and their potential impacts on the high-speed rail system.
The BHSR said that the Shinkansen is a closed system and the company is planning to spend at least two years determining if data from the weather bureau can be fully integrated into the Shinkansen system.
Company chairman Victor Liu (劉維琪) said that data from the weather bureau can help the company plan for train deployment when a typhoons strikes the nation and disrupts train schedules, adding that the partnership was proposed after the high-speed rail operator had a hard time deciding how to arrange its train service when Typhoon Dujuan hit the nation during the Mid-Autumn Festival holiday last year.
The company was criticized for canceling and delaying trains at short notice.
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