Taiwan cab ride Taipei to Hualien

[Nick_Burman]

 

Cab ride aboard a EMU1000 tilting trainset between Taipei and Hualien, down the island's east coast. Some pretty scenery in some places, especially after quitting Taipei's suburbs and along the coast. TRA is an interesting operation, the basic operating practices are Japanese (calling signals, etc...) while the trains and operating infrastructure are a mish-mash of practices (the OHW looks straight out of UK's WCML). Some impressive engineering on the Northern Link Line between Sun-Ao and Hualien.

 

Cheers Nicholas

[Railtunes]

Nice filming, Nick!

For those interested: At 31:48, the train enters Sandiaoling station with its overhead cement rock slide protection roof over the track. This is the junction for the Pingxi branchline to Shifen and Jingtong, the line I'm modeling with my AsiaNRail modules. The crossover to the other mainline for Pingxi line is at 32:05 and the branch diverges to the right at 32:14, curving along the near side of the Keelung River. The Yilan east coast mainline, on which the train is traveling, curves to the left, crossing the river and entering the Sandiaoling tunnel.

There are also several YouTube postings of cab rides for the full Pingxi branchline in both directions.

Paul Ingraham, AsiaNRail

[Socimi]

On 3/30/2019 at 7:44 PM, Nick_Burman said:

TRA is an interesting operation, the basic operating practices are Japanese (calling signals, etc...) while the trains and operating infrastructure are a mish-mash of practices (the OHW looks straight out of UK's WCML). Some impressive engineering on the Northern Link Line between Sun-Ao and Hualien.

 

Taiwan is really an interesting country (railway-wise and not only).

 

In short, the first railways were built by the Japanese (Taiwan was acutally part of the Empire of Japan until 1945), so the gauge, signalling, operations, signal-calling and even uniforms are based on the Japanese railways ones.

 

Then after 1949 and for the whole of the cold war, Taiwan became closely tied to the United States, so dieselization was done with american-style locomotives (of wich, many are still in regular service).

 

The 1976 electrification and modernization of mainlines was in fact made by the BREL consortium (British Rail Engineering Limited), with the infrastructure (pylons, cables...) and signalling saftey systems were based on those used in england at the time (in fact, TRA's AWS and ATP systems are identical to those in use by BR). 

Among other things, BREL built the EMU100 series for TRA, wich is based on the BR Mk2 coach design, and the electric locomotives were based on the american GE E60 design.

 

From the 1990s onwards, Taiwan started buying rolling stock from many more countries, including Italy (express EMU300 series made by Socimi of Milan), Germany (local EMU500 by Siemens) and Japan (Taroko Express by Hitachi, commuter trains by Kinki Sharyo and J-TREC, DMUs by Niigata Transys...).