Travelers can start booking tickets for Taiwan Railways Administration’s (TRA) new tourist train on April 1, the railway operator said at a product launch yesterday.
Reporters were invited onboard to check out one of the new trains, which was equipped with a dining car, a lounge car and business-class train cars.
The agency started renovating the Chukuang-class train cars, which have been in use for almost 18 years, in March last year and spent about NT$79 million (US$2.56 million) to convert them into tourist train cabins, said TRA Director-General Chang Cheng-yuan (張政源), who served as conductor for the day.
Photo: Peter Lo, Taipei Times
The agency now has 20 business-class train cars, six dining cars and three lounge cars.
It is also partnering with ezTravel to market the service, Chang said.
Families and companies planning a group tour can take advantage of the tourist train service, which would fit their needs perfectly, Chang said, adding that international visitors could board the train and experience the rail tour themselves.
The train also offers other services and facilities, including charging stations for smartphones, karaoke lounges and nursing rooms.
Speaking of the agency’s diversification plans, Chang said the TRA is to set up an asset development center next month, in line with its objective to have non-railway-related businesses account for 50 percent of its revenue by 2024.
Ticket sales accounted for about 80 percent, or NT$23 billion, of its revenue last year, while non-railway related businesses contributed NT$4.56 billion, TRA data showed.
One of the agency’s recent successes is turning an old facility — the Sinfong Railway Station in Hsinchu County — into a profit-generating machine by leasing the old station building to Starbucks Coffee.
The agency is also finding other ways to better utilize its assets, such as outsourcing management of businesses at Taipei Railway Station to Breeze Center Corp under a renovate-operate-transfer business model.
Additionally, the TRA has a property in Taipei’s Nangang District (南港) that is open to bidding from interested developers, while a hotel inside New Kaohsiung Railway Station is soon to be completed.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the