Taiwan's beautiful HS railway takes shape

摘要

Taiwan's High Speed railway is the largest build-own transfer (BOT) railway in the world. It is on track to commence 350 km/h revenue services with Japanese-designed Shinkansen trains in October this year. To finance the $17.8 billion cost of one of the great high speed rail projects of the 21st century a syndicate of no less than 25 Taiwan banks contributed $13.5 billion. The government contributed $4.6 billion. By Australian standards this expenditure on a single rail project is barely conceivable. The TGV very high speed railway envisaged for Sydney-Canberra only a few years back would have required only about $2 billion. So what is it that invokes such powerful forces in Taiwan and induces such a level of expenditure on a railway.