Traveling across the nation on a fully electrified rail system is close to becoming reality, as the last link of the network — the south-link railway electrification project — is to enter its most crucial stage soon, transportation officials said yesterday.
“The project will undergo a huge jump,” Railway Reconstruction Bureau Secretary-General Wen Tai-hsin (溫代欣) said.
Wen said the bureau is to start installing cables inside the 42 tunnels that cover 40.8km of the 123.4km rail section, which connects Taitung County and Pingtung County.
From Sept. 6 this year to June 30, 2019, working hours on the south-link project are to increase from five to 10 hours at a time during certain periods, to take into account the tunnel work, he said.
Previous work has focused on getting the basic infrastructure ready, including track upgrades and reinforcement of surrounding slopeland, the bureau said.
As a result of the increased workload, services between 7pm and midnight on the link are to be suspended from Mondays to Thursdays, as well as on Saturdays, the bureau said.
However, services during the peak July-to-August are to remain unchanged.
Passengers can take shuttle buses at a 20 percent discount during the affected periods, it said.
Commercial operation of the fully electrified train network is expected to commence in 2020 upon completion of the south-link project, and the fastest train from Taipei to Taitung will take only three-and-a-half hours either via the west coast or the east coast, the Ministry of Transportation and Communications said.
This is expected to make travel to and from eastern Taiwan more convenient, as train rides from Taipei to Taitung currently take five to seven hours.
The nation began to electrify its rail system in the 1970s, with the first project completed in 1979 on the section between Keelung and Kaohsiung along the west coast.
The second project was completed in 2000 on the section between Keelung and Yilan County, followed by the north-link line between Yilan and Hualien County in 2003.
The Hualien-Taitung section, which launched its electric train service in 2014, is the most recent to complete electrification.
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