The Japanese manufacturer of the Puyuma Express train involved in a deadly derailment on Oct. 21 has promised to immediately fix a design flaw exposed by the crash, the Taiwan Railways Administration (TRA) said yesterday.
Following the accident, it was discovered that the train did not automatically alert the dispatch control room when the driver turned off the automatic safety system that prevents trains speeding.
There is an automatic train protection (ATP) system in every train, and remote control systems in the Shulin and Hualien depots sending messages to the dispatch control room, but the two were never connected.
The Japanese company is to create a link between the two, which the TRA hopes would improve the safety of the Puyuma Express trains, known for their tilting feature, which allows them to travel faster on existing curved tracks.
The agency said that Nippon Sharyo, a subsidiary of Central Japan Railway Co, would start testing how to make the remote monitoring system connecting the ATP and the dispatch control center work.
Based on the test results, which should be available in one to two days, the two sides would decide how much time would be required to install the feature on all 18 of the TRA’s Puyuma Express trains.
The fix would not not cost the agency additional money, it said.
However, it added that it does not yet know whether it will seek compensation from Nippon Sharyo, as the government is still reviewing the case.
“There will not be any action before the Japanese manufacturer and the Cabinet’s investigative task force fully understand the situation, but we will do whatever is needed based on the contract,” a TRA official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Speeding was to blame for the accident, in which Puyuma Express No. 6432 from New Taipei City to Taitung County derailed in Yilan County while traveling at nearly twice the permissible speed as it entered a curve, leaving 18 people dead and 215 injured.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater