The majority of passengers traveling on the ill-fated Puyuma Express No. 6432 departing from New Taipei City’s Shulin Station and bound for Taitung County boarded at Taipei Railway Station.
The train derailed near Yilan County’s Sinma (新馬) Train Station, on the way from Luodong Railway Station to the train’s next stop, Hualien Railway Station.
By then, all the passengers traveling to Yilan County had alighted, either at Yilan or Luodong. All of those who died or were injured were bound for Hualien or Taitung.
Train accident reports have always been written by the railway administration, with experts and scholars well-acquainted with the Taiwan Railways Administration (TRA) being invited to make the occasional contribution to the investigation.
This has made it difficult to produce truly impartial, objective reports, and makes it difficult for the TRA to learn from its mistakes or determine what disciplinary measures need to be taken.
The public expects a truthful investigation, conducted by professionals, sufficient to win the trust of family members of the victims, insurance companies, the media and the public. What it does not want to see is equivocation and erroneous statements by the TRA, or for the issue to fade away once the news cycle moves on.
People need to know that the safety of passengers is guaranteed and the TRA needs to find a way to regain public confidence.
The derailment of a German Intercity Express high-speed train on June 3, 1998, killed 101 people and injured 88, the world’s deadliest high-speed rail disaster.
Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute, the largest institute of applied sciences in Europe, was charged with investigating the cause of the accident.
The investigation found that one steel tire on a wheel belonging to the first car broke apart due to metal fatigue and peeled away from the wheel, causing many other cars to derail and inflicting severe damage and loss to human life.
Taiwan should learn hard lessons from painful past experiences, either by following the US model of establishing an independent public investigative agency, such as the US National Transportation Safety Board, or by learning from Germany and assigning investigations to a major research institute.
Only by stopping the Ministry of Transportation and Communications from acting both as player and referee can solutions be found following traffic accidents, rather than being stuck in a rut that only cures the symptoms without finding the root cause.
Demanding that a few politicians step down from office will neither bring real closure to those affected, nor prevent similar disasters from happening again. Larry Lin is a faculty member of National Taiwan University and former visiting research fellow at Harvard University.
Translated by Chang Ho-ming
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