The ministry initially planned to shorten the Taipei-Yilan route by building a straight railway line, to be operated by Taiwan Railway Corp (TRC). The Railway Bureau abandoned the plan in 2019 and advocated to have a HSR extension built instead, saying that it would reduce the travel time to 28 minutes and avoid the watershed. “The HSR proposal only surfaced 20 years after the nation considered whether the straight railway line should be built,” Hochen said. However, all these considerations were nowhere to be found in the bureau’s deliberations over the HSR extension,” he said. The cost of building the straight railway line increased by NT$86 billion (US$2.75 billion), while the HSR extension decreased by NT$12.6 billion, he said.

Source: Taipei Times January 29, 2026 17:15 UTC