History of Railways in Taiwan

30-Second Overview: In 1891, Taiwan built the first passenger railway in all of China — and when Japan took over four years later, engineers declared it so poorly built it had to be torn up and rebuilt from scratch. From that "consumptive railroad" to a 300 km/h bullet train, Taiwan spent 136 years stitching a mountainous island into a one-day living circle. In 2024, the high-speed rail alone carried 78.25 million passengers, while the legacy TRA finally corporatized after a crash that killed 49 people. The island's turns are etched into its tracks.

Davidson's Train Ride

In 1895, American journalist James W. Davidson boarded a train from Keelung to Taipei. What he witnessed made it into his book The Island of Formosa: passengers who bought second-class tickets crammed into first-class carriages, others hauled chickens, piglets, vegetables, and slabs of pork aboard, and the coaches began swaying violently after just a few miles — faster speeds only made the human-and-livestock cocktail more chaotic.

This was Liu Mingchuan's railway in its full glory.

In 1887, Taiwan's first governor Liu Mingchuan established the "Taiwan Railway Bureau" in Dadaocheng, hired German engineer Becker to survey the route, and began constructing what would become the first passenger railway in all of China. The Keelung-to-Taipei section opened in 1891; the line reached Hsinchu by 1893, totaling about 107 kilometers. The route crossed Shiqiuling mountain from Keelung, passed through Badu, Nangang, and Xikou (Songshan), then swung through Haishankou (Xinzhuang) and over Guilunling to Taoyuan and onward.

It sounded like the dawn of modernization. The execution was another story.

The "Consumptive Railroad"

After Japan took control of Taiwan following the First Sino-Japanese War, Governor-General Kabayama Sukenori personally rode the train from Keelung to Taipei in June 1895. The trip was so rough — lurching coaches, glacial speed, unstable roadbed — that the soldiers accompanying him nicknamed it the "consumptive railroad" (肺病鐵道), a train as wheezy as a tuberculosis patient.

Three months later, a Japanese engineering survey team arrived and found the situation even worse. Railway engineer Koyama Yasumasa discovered that wooden ties had been stolen from the Taipei-Hsinchu section, rails were missing, and the stations were mud-brick huts that all needed demolishing. Worst of all, the route from Taipei over Guilunling to Taoyuan was so steep that locomotives could barely climb it.

The Japanese made a radical call: tear it up and start over.

North of Taipei, they abandoned the Shiqiuling tunnel route for a flatter alignment through Sankeng to Badu. South of Taipei, the changes were even more dramatic — the original route through Xinzhuang and Guilunling was scrapped in favor of a new line through Banqiao and Yingge. This single decision reshaped the fortunes of entire towns: Xinzhuang faded into decades of obscurity while Banqiao began its rise.

Buried in this infrastructure story is a historical argument that still flares up today.

Who Is the "Father of Taiwan's Railways"?

In July 2020, the National Taiwan Museum's newly opened Railway Department Park identified Hasegawa Kinsuke — the Japanese chief engineer who oversaw construction of the trunk line — as the "Father of Taiwan's Railways." Within a week, a political firestorm erupted. Former legislator Tsai Cheng-yuan demanded to know why a Japanese engineer received the title when Liu Mingchuan built the island's first railway.

The uncomfortable truth sits in a gray zone: Liu Mingchuan did build Taiwan's first railway, but it was so poorly constructed that Japan demolished it entirely. Hasegawa spent nine years in Taiwan from 1899, overseeing the Western Trunk Line from Keelung to Kaohsiung — 404 kilometers that formed the real foundation of today's rail network, completed in 1908.

One was the dreamer, the other the builder. Which one deserves the title depends on whether you think starting matters more than finishing. (Source: UDN Opinion)

October 1908: The Day in Taichung Park

On April 20, 1908, the Western Trunk Line opened along its entire length. That October 24, the Governor-General's office held the "Trunk Railway Completion Ceremony" in Taichung Park, building a Japanese-Western hybrid pavilion as a VIP rest house. That pavilion still stands on the lake in Taichung Park today — it is the city's icon.

The trunk line rewrote Taiwan's spatial logic. Before the railway, the island was a string of isolated settlements clustered around river ports. Afterward, towns near train stations — Taichung, Chiayi, Tainan — rapidly sprouted commercial districts and became regional hubs. The railroad decided which places thrived and which were forgotten, a pattern that persisted for a century.

The trunk line split into a Mountain Line and a Coastal Line. The Mountain Line from Zhunan cut through Miaoli and Taichung's hills to Changhua; Old Mountain Line's Shengxing Station, at 402 meters elevation, marked the highest point on the western trunk. The Coastal Line hugged the shore through Tongxiao, Dajia, and Qingshui — flatter but plagued by sand dunes requiring special stabilization. The two strands merged at Zhunan and Changhua like two cords of a single necklace.

A Railway at 2,274 Meters

In 1912, an even more audacious line was completed.

The Alishan Forest Railway starts at sea level in Chiayi City and climbs to 2,274 meters on Alishan, spanning 71 kilometers with an elevation gain exceeding 2,000 meters. Engineers deployed four of the world's five mountain railway construction methods: loops, Z-shaped switchbacks, spirals, and alternating bridges and tunnels. The line threads through over 50 tunnels and crosses 77 wooden bridges.

It was built to drag thousand-year-old cypress logs down the mountain. When the logging ended, the railway accidentally became Taiwan's most scenic tourist line — a two-hour vertical transect from betel-nut groves through bamboo forests into cloud-wrapped conifers, a living cross-section of the island's ecology.

Taiwan's Ministry of Culture has listed the Alishan Forest Railway among the island's 18 potential World Heritage Sites. In 2018, the Executive Yuan established a dedicated office to preserve this century-old industrial heritage. (Source: Ministry of Culture; Wikipedia)

The Bento That Outlasted the Brand

In 1949, TRA began selling boxed meals at five major stations: Kaohsiung, Tainan, Taichung, Taipei, and Songshan. The early offerings were plain rice-and-vegetable affairs, but over the decades they evolved into the iconic braised pork chop bento — a deep-soy-marinated cutlet nestled beside pickled mustard greens, tofu, and a hard-boiled egg. (Source: Taiwan Panorama)

By the 2020s, TRA was selling over 10 million bentos a year. Taipei Main Station alone moved upward of 10,000 a day, nearly 90% of them the pork chop variety. The joke that TRA is "a bento shop held back by its trains" carries a real sting: the railway's service quality drew chronic criticism, but the bento's reputation never wavered. (Source: UDN)

What the bento sells is not just food. The aluminum box, the dark-sauced chop, the pickles crammed into corners — for many Taiwanese, this is the smell of traveling by rail, a ritual of being on the move.

The "Zero Government Funding" Gamble

By the 1990s, Taiwan's north-south corridor was choking. Freeways gridlocked; domestic flights were overbooked. The government decided to build a high-speed railway using the BOT (Build-Operate-Transfer) model.

In 1997, a consortium led by Yin Chi won the contract by promising "zero government funding," beating a rival bid that asked for NT$150 billion in public money. Total construction cost: roughly NT$513.3 billion. The system adopted Japan's Shinkansen 700T technology. Service launched in January 2007 — Taipei to Kaohsiung in 95 minutes, top speed 300 km/h.

But "zero funding" quickly became a financial nightmare. Early ridership fell short of projections, and massive interest payments kept the company bleeding. By 2009, debt exceeded NT$400 billion, and Yin Chi resigned as chairperson. The company teetered on the edge of bankruptcy; CEO Ou Chin-der blocked a board proposal to let it go under, arguing that a government bailout "would be bad for society." (Source: CommonWealth Magazine)

A government-led financial restructuring in 2015 extended the concession period and reshuffled equity. THSR survived. In 2024, annual ridership hit 78.25 million, revenue topped NT$53.19 billion for the first time, and daily average ridership reached 214,000. (Source: UDN)

From near-bankruptcy to NT$50 billion in revenue — the high-speed rail story is not a clean success narrative. It is a lesson in public infrastructure, private capital, and political brinkmanship.

49 Lives for a Reform

On April 2, 2021, the eve of the Qingming holiday, TRA's Taroko Express No. 408 slammed into a construction truck that had slid from an embankment near Qingshui Tunnel in Hualien. Forty-nine people died; over 200 were injured. It was TRA's deadliest accident since 1948.

The investigation exposed far more than a rogue truck. It laid bare systemic rot: lax construction oversight, a weak safety culture, and bureaucratic calcification. Abe Seiji, a safety consultant from JR West Japan, told Taiwan's external review committee bluntly: "By my standards, JR West scored only 50 out of 100 after 18 years of reform following the Fukuchiyama crash. TRA's safety awareness is still where JR West was before that disaster." (Source: The Reporter)

On January 1, 2024, the Taiwan Railway Administration was officially reorganized into the state-owned Taiwan Railway Corporation. The inaugural chairman and CEO signed a "Safety Charter" and posted it at the entrance of TRA headquarters. Corporatization is meant to break the bureaucratic mold and introduce corporate governance — but changing an organization is one thing; changing a culture is a question nobody dares answer with certainty.

An Island's Nervous System

Taiwan's railway map reads like a nervous system: the western trunk line is the spinal cord, the high-speed rail runs parallel as the express channel, the eastern Hualien and Taitung lines are nerve endings reaching into the mountains, and the Alishan and Pingxi branch lines are capillaries.

This system grew from Liu Mingchuan's swaying "consumptive railroad" of 1891, was torn up and rebuilt by Japan, bombed in wartime and patched in peace, electrified and accelerated, nearly bankrupted by a private-sector gamble, and reformed at the cost of 49 lives.

When the Railway Department Park opened in Taipei in 2020, the exhibit panel named Hasegawa Kinsuke as the father of Taiwan's railways. In the hills of Keelung's Anle District, Liu Mingchuan's Shiqiuling Tunnel still stands — Taiwan's first railroad tunnel, its brick walls thick with moss. And today's MRT Xinzhuang-Luzhou Line from Daqiaotou to Huilong follows almost exactly the same route as Liu Mingchuan's 1893 railway, only now it runs underground.

A hundred and thirty years later, the road is still there. Just reskinned.

History of Railways in Taiwan

History of Railways in Taiwan

Davidson's Train Ride

The "Consumptive Railroad"

Who Is the "Father of Taiwan's Railways"?

October 1908: The Day in Taichung Park

A Railway at 2,274 Meters

The Bento That Outlasted the Brand

The "Zero Government Funding" Gamble

49 Lives for a Reform

An Island's Nervous System

References

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