Following nearly nine years of restoration work at the former Taipei Railway Workshop, the site is to partially open today as the National Railway Museum (NRM), reviving a historic location where trains still run and memories ride with them.
Built in 1935, the site was once Taiwan's main hub for train maintenance and assembly.
The location was designated a national historic site in 2015, with a project to transform it into a museum through three stages launched the following year.
Photo: Hu Shun-hsian, Taipei Times
The first stage of the preservation and restoration efforts, which covers one-third of the 17-hectare site, is completed and will be open to the public starting today.
A total of five exhibitions are to be held across the Diesel- Electric Locomotive Workshop, which served as the main site for disassembling and reassembling trains and currently stores 24 retired locomotives on display, as well as a bathhouse and the main office building.
According to the Ministry of Culture, a major highlight at the museum is the weekend short ride on a restored blue diesel train, which offers not only a sense of nostalgia, but also a rare opportunity to experience Taiwan’s railway heritage firsthand.
Photo courtesy of the Ministry of Culture
Cheng Ming-chang (鄭銘彰), head of the National Railway Museum preparatory office, said that one of the main challenges behind the nine-year effort was integrating exhibits tailored to different audiences into a protected historic site.
“It was not just restoration,” he said.
“We had to plan exhibits, preserve history and race against time to save old trains,” he said of the retired locomotives and train carriages acquired from Taiwan Railway Corp.
Photo courtesy of the Ministry of Culture
Cheng said that the restoration of the remaining areas is ongoing.
At an opening ceremony at the museum yesterday, Premier Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰) reflected on his family’s connection to the railways, saying that both his grandfather and father once worked for the railway.
Meanwhile, Minister of Culture Li Yuan (李遠) recalled growing up next to a railway track, calling the smell of engine oil “the scent of memory.”
Lee described railways as a cultural thread that connect generations.
Considering that most countries issue more than five denominations of banknotes, the central bank has decided to redesign all five denominations, the bank said as it prepares for the first major overhaul of the banknotes in more than 24 years. Central bank Governor Yang Chin-lung (楊金龍) is expected to report to the Legislative Yuan today on the bank’s operations and the redesign’s progress. The bank in a report sent to the legislature ahead of today’s meeting said it had commissioned a survey on the public’s preferences. Survey results showed that NT$100 and NT$1,000 banknotes are the most commonly used, while NT$200 and NT$2,000
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) yesterday reported the first case of a new COVID-19 subvariant — BA.3.2 — in a 10-year-old Singaporean girl who had a fever upon arrival in Taiwan and tested positive for the disease. The girl left Taiwan on March 20 and the case did not have a direct impact on the local community, it said. The WHO added the BA.3.2 strain to its list of Variants Under Monitoring in December last year, but this was the first imported case of the COVID-19 variant in Taiwan, CDC Deputy Director-General Lin Ming-cheng (林明誠) said. The girl arrived in Taiwan on
South Korea is planning to revise its controversial electronic arrival card, a step Taiwanese officials said prompted them to hold off on planned retaliatory measures, a South Korean media report said yesterday. A Yonhap News Agency report said that the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs is planning to remove the “previous departure place” and “next destination” fields from its e-arrival card system. The plan, reached after interagency consultations, is under review and aims to simplify entry procedures and align the electronic form with the paper version, a South Korean ministry official said. The fields — which appeared only on the electronic form
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) is suspending retaliation measures against South Korea that were set to take effect tomorrow, after Seoul said it is updating its e-arrival system, MOFA said today. The measures were to be a new round of retaliation after Taiwan on March 1 changed South Korea's designation on government-issued alien resident certificates held by South Korean nationals to "South Korea” from the "Republic of Korea," the country’s official name. The move came after months of protests to Seoul over its listing of Taiwan as "China (Taiwan)" in dropdown menus on its new online immigration entry system. MOFA last week
RSS