On May 25, the day the 12 cars that comprise the 700T train were disembarked at Kaohsiung Harbor, THSRC and the Kaohsiung municipal government organized a parade and carnival at the port. The parade featured more than 20 foreign engineers and contractors who work for THSRC, each carrying their country's flag, as well as a boy bullet-train mascot who waved to the crowd.
The day's main attraction, the 700T bullet train, is white with orange and black stripes, and has a long streamlined locomotive. The 700T was custom built for THSRC by a Japanese Shinkansen consortium, and is based on the Series 700 Tokaido-Sanyo Shinkansen. The locomotive and 11 cars are 304 meters long and weigh in at 503 tons. The first car has a driver cab, passenger cabin seats, toilet, public telephone, and a passenger information display monitor. To meet Taiwan's requirements, the humidity control and digital communication systems were also upgraded. Each car cost NT$100 million to build.
Nita Ing says that construction on the high-speed rail project is 60% complete. This includes the civil engineering work, which is 100% complete. Work on train stations, tracks, maintenance bases and electronic, electrical and mechanical systems is well underway. Ing is confident that the entire project will be completed on schedule by the end of next year.
Work crews experienced many ups and downs during the more than five years they spent excavating, building the trackbed, and constructing viaducts and bridges. The project has certainly not been a smooth ride. For example, in Yunlin County it has long been illegal to dig wells for agricultural irrigation. But just in the townships of Tuku, Yuanchang, and Peikang, through which the high-speed rail line passes, nearly 2500 illegal wells have been dug, causing land subsidence of 5-7 centimeters a year. This seriously endangers the safety of the high-speed rail service.
The problem of land subsidence has been much debated for years, but no easy solution has been found. Premier Yu Shyi-kun has agreed to establish an experimental area where farmers will be encouraged and rewarded for planting trees on farmland affected by land subsidence. The plan is to turn the land into recreation areas. In addition, the Water Resources Bureau, Ministry of Economic Affairs, will declare a three-kilometer belt on each side of the high-speed railway line to be a groundwater control area. The bureau is also negotiating the reconstruction, sealing off, or relocation of 73 wells under the management of the Yunlin Irrigation Association and the Taiwan Sugar Corporation. By treating both the root causes and the symptoms of land subsidence, using a multi-pronged approach, and working in concert with various ministries and associations, it ought to be possible to bring the problem under effective control.
In addition, this major infrastructure project built under the build-operate-transfer (BOT) formula, which is seen as indicative of the formula's success or failure, has been beset by fundraising woes that have aroused concern in and out of government. In accordance with the THSRC's original budget, NT$10 billion was to have been raised in February of this year, and the corporation's capitalization was to be increased by NT$30.9 billion over the whole year. But so far THSRC has raised less than a third of the initial NT$10 billion. In anticipation of further fundraising difficulties, in March THSRC began negotiations with the banking consortium that is backing the project, proposing a new fundraising program with a delayed timetable.
In September of this year, the 700T train that is already in Taiwan will be put through its paces in test runs between Liuchia, Tainan County, and Tashe, Kaohsiung County, a distance of 60 kilometers. Once the bullet-train service is inaugurated at the end of next year, the Taipei-Taichung trip will only take 46 minutes, and the Taipei-Kaohsiung trip only 90 minutes. This should make the dream that Taiwan's western corridor will be a one-day community a reality. The new train line should also stimulate the development of the towns along the route. New town centers will give people more choices in deciding where to live and work, and will in some instances completely reconfigure the communities along the rail line.
Let us hope that as it races the length of Taiwan at a speed of 300 km/h, the bullet train will generate new ideas and business opportunities.
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