Alishan lumber workhorse-turned-tourist attraction facing crisis

Built as a workhorse by the Japanese colonialists to exploit Taiwan's precious wood, and later converted into a tourist attraction, the Alishan Forest Railway is now facing a crisis of existence after the typhoon undermined the tracks with the worst flooding in Taiwan in half a century.

Staggering downpours that fell non-stop for nearly three days brought the mountain railway to a complete halt, with its tracks damaged or washed away by flash floods in more than 400 places.

Tourists attracted to Alishan by the thrill of taking a pre-dawn train ride to watch the sun rise from a sea of clouds over Jade Mountain with the whistle of the mountain trains in the distance piercing the calm, will be out of luck now, as the Forest Bureau, which oversees the railway, has no timetable for when or even if the railway will be repaired.

Professor Hung Ju-chiang of National Taiwan University, an expert in geotechnical engineering, said many sections of the 86km narrow gauge network built a century ago are constructed on soft, loose colluvial soil, making them vulnerable to floodwater and landslides.

“These vulnerable sections have been financial black holes because of their liability to fail,” said Hung, a member of the central government's Post-Typhoon Morakot Reconstruction Committee.

He suggested that several sections of the railway are worthy of conserving because of their high tourism value, but said other vulnerable sections should be abandoned altogether.

Instead, he suggested, a cable car system could be built over the Alishan scenic area, which is one of the top three “must sees” for tourists from China, whose numbers are growing fast to become one of the major sources of Taiwan's foreign tourists.

Before the killer typhoon, which claimed the lives of more than 600, government agencies had listed the railway as a potential candidate for inclusion as a United Nations World Heritage Site.

The railway is unique, with several steep gradients, a spiral and four switchbacks. It climbs through the most dramatic climate changes of any railway of its kind in the world, running from the city of Chiayi in southern Taiwan from an elevation of 30m to the top station of Alishan, located near the Jade Mountain massif that is part of Taiwan's Central Mountain Range, at an elevation of 2,274m.

The vegetation along the way changes from tropical to temperate and finally alpine. The line's unique “Z” switchbacks and spirals are a marvel of engineering and the huge U.S.-built iron Shay locomotives that began bringing down timber in 1912 were something Taiwanese had never seen before.

According to Alishan Forest Railway, a historical account of the railway authored by the late Chang Hsin-yu, who worked for 50 years on the railway — initially called the Imperial Taiwan Railway — and retired as its head administrator, the Alishan Forest Railway also serves as a window on Japanese colonial history in Taiwan.

The Japanese colonial government began planning the narrow gauge line in the late 19th century as a means to facilitate the logging of the area's valuable red cypress.

A Japanese official in charge of development in Taiwan, Ohtosaku Saito, ventured into Taiwan's Central Mountain Range in 1896, the year after the Japanese occupied Taiwan, traveling at the head of a 27-member expedition. Their aim was to find Jade Mountain, but on the way, they accidentally discovered a huge coniferous forest on Alishan, according to Chang's book.

In his report to the then-Taiwanese Governor-General Maresuke Nogi, Saito wrote that he had found a great number of giant ancient trees, many of which were over 1,000 years old.

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