The government intends to spend NT$4.181 billion (US$138.96 million) on building a branch line to connect the High Speed Rail station in Changhua County with the Taiwan Railways Administration (TRA) station in Tianjhong Township (田中), as well as on infrastructure upgrades along the Jiji branch line (集集支線) in Nantou County, Minister of Transportation and Communications Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍) said yesterday.
Lin made the announcement during his tour of the TRA station in the township, where the high-speed rail station is also located.
The small town to the south of the county has become a popular tourist destination due to the Taiwan Rice Heaven-Tianzhong Marathon, where participants run while sampling various dishes presented by local residents along the way.
Photo: Chen Kuan-pei, Taipei Times
Construction on the 3km branch line is scheduled to begin next year, with the cost estimated to reach NT$1.181 billion, Lin said.
The branch line is to begin operations by 2026, he added.
The government would also spend NT$2.363 billion on upgrading the infrastructure along the TRA’s 29.75km Jiji branch line, Lin said.
The upgrade would help reduce waiting time between services on the line from 80 minutes to 60 minutes, Lin said.
The trains on the line would consist of six carriages instead of four, which would increase the number of passengers that they can carry one-way by 33 percent, he added.
The two projects, which would be funded by the budget allocated to the Forward-looking Infrastructure Development Program, were previously rejected by the National Development Council for their low cost-to-benefit ratios, Lin said.
“I then asked the Railway Bureau to integrate these two projects, which helped secure the Executive Yuan’s approval,” he said.
Once the projects are completed, domestic and international visitors can seamlessly transit to Jiji and Tianjhong branch lines after they arrive at the high-speed rail station in Changhua, Lin said.
The government would try to integrate the branch lines with the cable car service at Nantou County’s Sun Moon Lake (日月潭), making it the nation’s first tourism railway system, he said.
The ministry would propose an amendment to the Railway Act (鐵路法) and other relevant regulations, so that the ticketing scheme for the tourism railway service would be different from that of the regular train service, Lin said.
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
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
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,