Taiwan Railway History

30-second overview: In 1891, Taiwan built the first passenger railway in all of China, only for the Japanese to take it over and find that it was so poor it had to be torn up and rebuilt. From Liu Ming-chuan’s “consumptive railway” to the high-speed rail line running at 300 kilometers per hour in 2007, Taiwan spent 136 years stitching an island with almost no plains into a one-day living circle. In 2024, Taiwan High Speed Rail carried 78.25 million passengers in a single year, while Taiwan Railways finally became a corporation after an accident that took 49 lives. The rails are etched into every turning point of this island.

James W. Davidson’s Railway Encounter

In 1895, the American journalist James W. Davidson arrived in Taiwan and took a train from Keelung to Taipei. What he saw made its way into his later book, The Island of Formosa: some passengers bought second-class tickets and squeezed into the first-class carriage; others boarded with chicks, piglets, and piles of vegetables and pork. After the train had gone only a few miles, it began to sway. Once it picked up speed, the people and livestock in the carriage rocked from side to side together.

This was the real face of Liu Ming-chuan’s railway.

In 1887, Liu Ming-chuan, the first governor of Taiwan, established the Taiwan Railway Commercial Bureau in Dadaocheng. He hired the German engineer Becker to survey the roadbed and began building Taiwan’s, and all of China’s, first passenger railway. The Keelung-Taipei section opened in 1891, and the line was extended to Hsinchu in 1893, reaching a total length of about 107 kilometers. The route crossed Shiqiuling from Keelung, passed Badu, Nangang, and Xikou (Songshan), crossed Daqiaotou into Haishankou (Xinzhuang), then climbed over Guilunling to Taoyuan and Zhongli before reaching Hsinchu.

It sounds like the great starting point of modernization. The problem was that the line really was not built very well.

The “Consumptive Railway”

After the First Sino-Japanese War, Japan took possession of Taiwan. In June 1895, Governor-General Kabayama Sukenori personally rode the train from Keelung to Taipei. Problems emerged all along the way: the train shook, its speed was extremely slow, and the roadbed was soft. The soldiers accompanying him gave it a nickname: the “consumptive railway,” meaning that the line was like a tuberculosis patient, gasping for breath after taking two steps.

The professional engineering team sent by Japan arrived in Keelung three months later, and its on-site findings were even worse. Railway engineer Koyama Yasumasa discovered that many sleepers had been pulled out from the Taipei-Hsinchu section, and even rails were missing. The stations were built from adobe and all had to be demolished and rebuilt. The most fatal problem was the route design itself: the section from Taipei through Xinzhuang and over Guilunling to Taoyuan was too steep for trains to climb.

The Japanese made a decision: tear it up and start again.

North of Taipei, they abandoned the Shiqiuling tunnel section and rerouted through the flatter Sankeng area, boring a new tunnel to Badu. South of Taipei, the change was even more substantial. They abandoned the original route through Xinzhuang and Guilunling and instead ran the line through Banqiao and Yingge to Taoyuan. This single change directly rewrote the fate of the towns along the line: Xinzhuang fell into decades of quiet after losing the railway, while Banqiao began to rise because of the new route.

Hidden here is a historical question that remains contentious: who is really the “father of Taiwan’s railways”?

How the Foreign Names Peeled Away

Liu Ming-chuan was not the only person behind Liu Ming-chuan’s railway. In 1887, the Taiwan Railway Commercial Bureau in Dadaocheng first brought in a mixed German-British foreign team: the German Becker handled engineering design and roadbed surveys; the British W. Watson served as head of route surveys; H.C. Matheson was listed as a commercial adviser. Behind them was Jardine Matheson’s transnational procurement network in Shanghai, the same firm that had just built China’s first railway, the Woosung Road, in Shanghai in 1876¹.

The eight steam locomotives were also German-British in composition. No. 1, “Tengyun,” and No. 2, “Yufeng,” were ordered from Germany; the other six came from Britain. Numbered 1 through 8, they each carried Qing-era Mandarin names such as Jiedian, Chaochen, and Shejing². On the day the first section opened in 1891, the people in the cab included German technicians, British technicians, and Qing army soldier-apprentices. Engineering design authority rested with foreigners, while construction was handed to Qing soldiers and local laborers who could not read drawings. That disjunction was later confirmed firsthand by Davidson when he rode that swaying train.

The problem is that this foreign team did not leave names behind. After the Japanese took over and rebuilt the line, Becker’s roadbed was rerouted, Watson’s surveys were overturned, and Matheson’s contracts were voided. Even today, it is difficult to find Becker’s full name in Chinese-language materials. All sources provide only his surname, and even the exhibit panels at the Taiwan Railway Museum mention him only in passing¹.

The Japanese who took over did leave names, but they too went through a genealogical reset.

Hasegawa Kinsuke (はせがわ きんすけ, 1855-1921) was the chief engineer of the trunk line. Born in Sanyo-Onoda, Yamaguchi Prefecture, he learned English in his youth while staying with his elder brother, who worked at the Osaka Mint. He later served as an interpreter for foreign engineers at Japan’s Railway Bureau, learning surveying as he translated³. In 1899, Gotō Shinpei transferred him from Japan proper to Taiwan to serve as chief engineer of the Provisional Taiwan Railway Construction Department. He stayed for nine years. The entire 404-kilometer trunk line from Keelung to Fengshan, its full opening on April 20, 1908, and the opening ceremony held at Taichung Park on October 24 were projects he laid from beginning to end⁴⁵.

Hasegawa’s presence was not only on the rails. He designed Keelung Station (1912) and Hsinchu Station (1913), and he also collaborated with Kondō Jūrō on the Red House in Ximending³. After he died of illness in Japan in 1921, a bronze statue of him once stood in front of Taipei Main Station. It was removed after the war. The removal of that statue was the standard operation in this lineage of foreign names: the records left by one generation were always renumbered by the next.

Hasegawa’s subordinates also produced an even more audacious branch line. Kawai Shitarō (かわい したろう, 1865-1931), a Nagoya native and graduate of the forestry department at Tokyo Imperial University, went to Germany and Austria in 1897 to study forestry administration and forest management. He initiated the Alishan Forest Railway⁶. This line had to climb from the plains of Chiayi to an elevation of 2,274 meters, a vertical difference of more than 2,000 meters. He used all four major methods of mountain railway engineering: loops, zigzag reversals, spiral lines, and alternating bridges and tunnels⁶. Kawai’s right-hand engineer, Shindō Kumanosuke, handled the survey from Zhuqi to Zhangnaoliao, the most difficult segment of the mountain railway. During a trial run after the whole line opened, he died in a derailment on the Alishan section. Among the foreign personnel, including these Japanese colonial technicians, he was the first to sacrifice his life on Taiwan’s rails.

Shinmoto Shikanosuke (しんもと しかのすけ, 1870-1949), a Kagoshima native who graduated from the civil engineering department of Tokyo Imperial University in 1894, first served as an engineer in the Railway Bureau of the Ministry of Communications before later taking over Hasegawa’s Taiwan railway system⁷. Chinese-language sources contain far fewer records of his specific work in Taiwan than of Hasegawa’s. This too is a common pattern in the Japanese colonial lineage: the story of the first chief engineer is written again and again, while the names of successors slowly recede into the footnotes.

📝 Curatorial View: From Becker to Hasegawa to Shinmoto, each foreign name was responsible for building one stretch of track, only to be partly overwritten when the next generation took over. Liu Ming-chuan’s railway was torn up and rebuilt by the Japanese; Hasegawa’s trunk line was renamed and renumbered by the postwar Taiwan Railways; Kawai’s forestry railway became a tourist route after logging ended. The Taiwan Railways track is truly alive and still running, but the cost of that life is that the records of the previous generation have all retreated into the footnotes: a single track that lost its foreign names.

Liu Ming-chuan or Hasegawa Kinsuke?

In July 2020, the National Taiwan Museum’s Railway Department Park opened. Its exhibition text described Hasegawa Kinsuke, head of the Government-General Railway Department during the Japanese colonial period, as the “father of Taiwan’s railways.” Within a week, a controversy erupted. Former legislator Chiu Yi-yuan challenged the claim: the first person to promote railways in Taiwan was clearly Liu Ming-chuan, so how could this title be given to a Japanese man?

The gray zone of the facts lies here: Liu Ming-chuan did indeed build Taiwan’s first railway, but that line was so poor that the Japanese dismantled it. Hasegawa Kinsuke stayed in Taiwan for nine years beginning in 1899 and oversaw construction of the 404-kilometer trunk line from Keelung to Kaohsiung. It opened in full in 1908. This, rather than Liu’s line, is the real foundation of today’s Taiwan Railways network.

One was a dreamer; the other was an executor. Who counts as the “father” depends on whether you think “starting” matters more, or “finishing” does. This framing follows the argumentative context of a United Daily News Opinion commentary by Chiang Ping-lun.

📝 Curatorial View: On the surface, the dispute over the “father of railways” is historical criticism. Beneath it is the identity politics that Taiwanese society is forever processing: which inheritance is “more ours,” the Qing legacy or the Japanese colonial legacy? This question appears not only in railways, but also in Japanese colonial architecture, hydraulic facilities, and even the medical system.

1908: That Day in Taichung Park

On April 20, 1908, the trunk line opened in full. On October 24 of the same year, the Taiwan Governor-General’s Office held the “Full Opening Ceremony of the Trunk Railway” in Taichung Park and built a twin-pavilion structure in a mixed Japanese-Western style as a rest house for imperial guests. That pavilion still stands today at the center of the lake in Taichung Park and remains a city landmark.

The trunk line changed Taiwan’s spatial logic. Before the railway, Taiwan was a string of separate settlements clustered along river ports. After the railway, towns beside stations such as Taichung, Chiayi, and Tainan rapidly developed commercial districts and became regional centers. Railway stations determined which places prospered and which were forgotten. This pattern lasted for a century.

The trunk line divides into the Mountain Line and the Coast Line. The Mountain Line runs from Zhunan through Miaoli and the Taichung hill country to Changhua; it was technically difficult, and the old Mountain Line’s Shengxing Station, at an elevation of 402 meters, is the highest point on the western trunk line. The Coast Line follows the west coast through Tongxiao, Dajia, and Qingshui. It is comparatively flat but has many sand dunes and required special sand-control works. The two lines meet at Zhunan and Changhua, like the two strands of a necklace.

A Railway at 2,274 Meters Above Sea Level

In 1912, another, even more audacious railway was completed.

The Alishan Forest Railway begins in downtown Chiayi and climbs all the way to Alishan at 2,274 meters above sea level. The line is 71 kilometers long, with a vertical difference of more than 2,000 meters. To overcome this terrain, engineers exhausted all four of the world’s major mountain railway techniques: loops, zigzag reversals, spiral lines, and alternating bridges and tunnels. The full line had more than 50 tunnels and 77 wooden bridges.

It was originally built to haul thousand-year-old Alishan cypress trees down the mountain for sale. After logging ended, the railway unexpectedly became Taiwan’s most beautiful tourist route. Taking the small train from the plains into the high mountains, passengers watch the view outside the window shift from betel nut groves to bamboo forests, then to mist-wrapped coniferous woods. In effect, two hours of travel crosses Taiwan’s vertical ecosystem.

The Ministry of Culture has listed the Alishan Forest Railway as one of Taiwan’s 18 potential World Heritage sites. In 2018, the Executive Yuan established the Alishan Forest Railway and Cultural Heritage Office to take charge of preserving this century-old industrial heritage. (Source: Ministry of Culture)

Black-Headed Trains and the Genealogy of Naming

The group of Taiwan Railways steam locomotives preserved at the Changhua Roundhouse in 2009. Photo: Neeson Hsu. CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

What ran on the tracks left by foreign engineers was another group of things. From the late Japanese colonial period into the postwar era, trains in Taiwan had their own Taiwanese-language names.

“Black-headed trains” (o͘-thâu-á) was the general term for all steam locomotives. The reason was that black paint resisted dirt, was easy to maintain, and made wartime concealment from the air easier; this protective color continued into the postwar period⁸. Since locomotives were entire black-painted hulks, ordinary people simply named them by color. The term “fire train” itself was a direct translation: fire produced steam, and steam drove the wheels. “Little fire train” was an affectionate term, used from the Japanese colonial period into the postwar years, for small steam locomotives. It and “black-headed train” were two naming layers for the same object, one emphasizing color and the other emphasizing motive power.

After the war, Taiwan Railways took over all steam locomotives introduced during the Japanese colonial period and renumbered them into three major series: CK, CT, and DT. Representative types included:

CK101 was a passenger-and-freight tank locomotive manufactured by Nippon Sharyo in 1917 and stored away for a time after the war. On Railway Day in 1998, it was fired up again at the Chiayi workshop, its whistle sounding as it pulled out. It was the first dynamically preserved steam locomotive in Taiwan Railways history⁹. Dynamic preservation means that it really still runs, rather than sitting in a museum as a specimen.

💡 Did you know? Taiwan Railways’ postwar steam locomotive numbering rules preserved the logic of the Japanese colonial period. CK refers to tank locomotives, with the water tank mounted on the locomotive body; CT refers to 4-6-2 passenger locomotives, derived from the JNR C series; DT refers to 2-8-2 freight locomotives, derived from the D series. A railway enthusiast can infer the wheel arrangement and purpose of a locomotive just by looking at the first letter of its number.

After the steam era ended, Taiwan Railways began giving passenger trains new names. This naming genealogy was more political than technical:

The naming process for the Tzu-chiang deserves a slower look. In 1976, Taiwan Railways commissioned the Public Opinion Survey Association of the Republic of China to conduct random interviews. The three candidate names that had been predetermined were Tzu-chiang, Sheng-li, and Tzu-yu. The survey results gave each of the three one-third of the vote, effectively showing no consensus. Taiwan Provincial Government chairman Hsieh Tung-min finally decided personally on “Tzu-chiang,” derived from the Chiang Ching-kuo-era slogan “solemnly strengthen ourselves, remain calm amid change”¹². On August 15, 1978, the EMU100 electric multiple unit, popularly nicknamed the “British Lady” because its body was manufactured by Britain’s GEC, officially entered service.

The names of the three generations of passenger trains from the 1970s to the 1980s all corresponded to Nationalist government political slogans: Chu-kuang, Tzu-chiang, and Fu-hsing. This naming genealogy testifies to the overlap, during the martial-law era, of engineering modernization and ideological modernization. The electric multiple unit technology really was imported; the outer packaging was the rhetoric of “remaining calm amid change.” After 1990, as discussions of railway privatization arose, a new generation of train types began using Indigenous place names and mountain names: Puyuma, from a Pinuyumayan word meaning “gathering,” and Taroko, from the Truku people. This was a turn in the naming history of the same railway, from “what we must not forget” to “what this island was originally called.”

✦ From Becker to Hasegawa to Puyuma: the tracks never changed, but the names kept changing.

The Bento Is More Famous Than the Train

In 1949, Taiwan Railways began producing boxed meals at railway restaurants in five stations: Kaohsiung, Tainan, Taichung, Taipei, and Songshan, so that long-distance passengers could eat conveniently. At first they were ordinary rice-and-dish bentos. Later, they gradually became the classic that leaves a lingering aroma: the braised pork chop bento. (Source: Taiwan Panorama)

By the 2020s, Taiwan Railways sold more than 10 million bentos a year. Taipei Main Station alone sold more than ten thousand a day, with braised pork chop bentos accounting for nearly 90 percent. Some people say Taiwan Railways is a “bento shop delayed by trains.” There is real bitterness in this joke: Taiwan Railways’ service quality has been criticized for years, but the reputation of its bentos has never wavered. (Source: United Daily News Time)

What Taiwan Railways bentos sell is not only food. The aluminum lunchbox, the dark braising sauce soaking into the pork chop, the pickled mustard greens and dried tofu tucked into the corners: for many Taiwanese people, these are the olfactory memory of train travel, a ritual sense of being “on the road.”

The “Zero Government Investment” Gamble

By the 1990s, north-south transportation in Taiwan was already saturated. National Freeway 1 and National Freeway 3 were jammed, and domestic flights were hard to book. The government decided to build a high-speed railway and tendered it as a BOT, or build-operate-transfer, project.

In 1997, the Taiwan High Speed Rail team led by Nita Ing defeated its rival with the promise of “zero government investment” and won the largest BOT project in history. Total construction costs were about NT$513.3 billion, and the system adopted Japan’s Shinkansen 700T train technology. It opened in January 2007. The fastest Taipei-Kaohsiung travel time was 1 hour and 35 minutes, at a speed of 300 kilometers per hour.

But the “zero investment” promise quickly became a financial nightmare. Initial ridership fell short of expectations, huge interest expenses kept the company in deficit, and debt at one point reached NT$400 billion. In 2009, Nita Ing resigned as chair, and Taiwan High Speed Rail nearly reached the edge of bankruptcy. That year, CEO Ou Chin-der blocked a bankruptcy proposal, arguing that a government buyback would be “unfavorable to society.” (Source: CommonWealth Magazine)

In 2015, the government led a financial restructuring, extending the concession period and adjusting the ownership structure. Taiwan High Speed Rail finally survived. In 2024, annual ridership reached 78.25 million, revenue surpassed NT$50 billion for the first time, reaching NT$53.19 billion, and average daily ridership was 214,000. (Source: United Daily News)

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

📝 Curatorial View: Taiwan’s high-speed rail BOT project taught Taiwan one thing: “zero government investment” sounds beautiful, but someone ultimately has to bear the risks of infrastructure. Most high-speed railways in the world are paid for by governments. Taiwan took twenty years to learn why.

Reform Bought With 49 Lives

On April 2, 2021, just before the Qingming long weekend, Taiwan Railways Taroko Express No. 408 struck a construction truck that had slid down a slope in front of Qingshui Tunnel in Hualien, killing 49 people and injuring more than 200. It was Taiwan Railways’ deadliest accident since 1948.

The accident investigation revealed not only a construction truck that had slid downhill, but also the systemic problems Taiwan Railways had accumulated over many years: loose construction management, a weak safety culture, and a rigid organization. Abe Seiji, a safety adviser from JR West in Japan, said bluntly that by his standards, “JR West, after 18 years of reform following the Fukuchiyama accident, scores only 50 points; Taiwan Railways, on the verge of corporatization, still has the same safety awareness that JR West had before the accident.” (Source: The Reporter)

On January 1, 2024, the Taiwan Railways Administration of the Ministry of Transportation and Communications was formally reorganized as the state-owned Taiwan Railway Corporation. Its first chair and general manager signed a “Safety Charter,” which was posted at the entrance of the company’s building. Corporatization is seen as the starting point for breaking the bureaucratic system and introducing corporate management. But after the organization changes, no one dares guarantee how long it will take for the culture to change.

An Island’s Nervous System

In 2021, DT668 was pushed by E327 on Taiwan Railways’ Coast Line, a contemporary example of dynamic preservation for a type equivalent to the late Japanese colonial-period D51. Photo: Cheng-en Cheng. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Taiwan’s railway map resembles a nervous system: the western trunk line is the spinal cord, the high-speed rail is the high-speed channel beside it, the eastern North-Link and South-Link lines are nerve endings extending toward Hualien and Taitung, and Alishan and Pingxi are capillaries.

This system grew out of Liu Ming-chuan’s swaying “consumptive railway” of 1891. It passed through Japanese demolition and rebuilding, wartime bombing and postwar repair, electrification and high-speed modernization, a gamble that nearly bankrupted the high-speed rail, and painful reform bought with 49 lives.

When the National Taiwan Museum’s Railway Department Park opened in 2020, its exhibition panel called Hasegawa Kinsuke the “father of Taiwan’s railways.” In the hills of Keelung’s Anle District, Liu Ming-chuan’s Shiqiuling Tunnel is still there: Taiwan’s first railway tunnel, its brick walls covered with moss. As for today’s MRT Zhonghe-Xinlu Line, the section from Daqiaotou to Huilong follows almost exactly the route of Liu Ming-chuan’s 1893 railway, except that it has gone underground.

One hundred and thirty years have passed. That road is still there. It has simply changed its skin.

References

• Taiwan Memory Exploration Team: October 24, 1908, Full Opening Ceremony of the Taiwan Trunk Railway
• GJ Taiwan: April 20, 1908, Full Opening of the Trunk Line Railway
• Vocus (Narrative Circle): Taiwan History Keyword | Liu Ming-chuan Railway
• United Daily News Opinion: Why Is Hasegawa Kinsuke the “Father of Railways,” and Liu Ming-chuan the “Railway Payer”?
• Newtalk: Kuan Jen-chien’s View: Chiu Yi-yuan Was Wrong! Liu Ming-chuan Is Not the “Father of Taiwan’s Railways”
• StoryStudio: When Did Taiwan Railway Bentos Begin to Be Sold?
• CommonWealth Magazine: Is Bankruptcy Really Taiwan High Speed Rail’s Only Fate?
• The Reporter: Did the Driver Disable ATP and Reverse on His Own? Fourth Anniversary of the Taroko Accident
• United Daily News: High-Speed Rail Revenue Broke NT$50 Billion for the First Time Last Year
• Wikipedia: Alishan Forest Railway
• Ministry of Culture (English): Alishan Forest Railway
• Taiwan Panorama: The Nostalgic Taste: Bento Culture Returns to Fashion

Foreign Engineers and Locomotive Lineages (Footnotes Added in the 2026-05-11 EVOLVE)

Image Sources

This article uses three CC-licensed images, all cached in public/article-images/history/ to avoid hotlinking to source servers:

• Taitung Line Steam Locomotive Fireman, 1970s — Photo provider: Chou Yung-fu, 1970s, CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons File:Locomotive_fireman_of_TRA_Taitung_Line_1970s.jpg
• Steam Locomotives at Changhua Roundhouse, 2009 — Photo: Neeson Hsu, 2009-08-30, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons File:2009-08-30_Steam_locomotives_at_TRA_Changhua_Roundhouse.jpg
• DT668 Pushed by E327 on the Coast Line, 2021 — Photo: Cheng-en Cheng, 2021-10-25, CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia Commons File:2021-10-25_TRA_DT668_pulled_by_E327_on_the_Coast_Line.jpg

Further Reading

• Qing Rule Period — The political background in which Liu Ming-chuan began laying rails
• Japanese Colonial Period — The colonial government context in which Hasegawa Kinsuke and Kawai Shitarō took over Taiwan’s railway construction
• Sino-French War — The war that led to Liu Ming-chuan’s appointment as Taiwan’s first governor, after which he immediately began construction of the Keelung-Hsinchu railway
• Taiwan Transportation System — The position of postwar railways within a diversified transportation network of highways, airports, and metro systems
• Taiwan High Speed Rail — The high-speed railway system that opened in 2007, the contemporary extension of Taiwan railway history