9/18/2008
High Speed in Taiwan
These are the trial runs for the Taiwan High Speed, from a couple years back. One thing that I found interesting was the driver appeared to be Taiwanese (I can only see that back of his head and his hand in the clip). I take the High Speed Rail quite a bit, and I have never noticed a Taiwanese driver. I have noticed lots of "foreign" drivers. Naturally, I was curious about the figures. This is what I found online: "At the start of operations, nearly all train operators were foreign. Of the current 89 train operators, however, 54 are Taiwanese; the remaining 35 are mostly French..." http://thirstyghosts2.blogspot.com/2008/01/on-right-track.html
I wonder what the exact totals were at the start. "Nearly all" sounds a bit weird (fishy) to me. Anyway, if all, or even nearly all, the drivers were "foreign", why not show a "foreign" driver in this promotional clip?
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9 comments:
I think he's driving the train, not High Speed Train.
After reading your "High Speed in Taiwan", I want to express that it's not worthwhile for you to deeply wonder what the exact foreign drivers in total were at the start. No doubt, the number was "nearly all" that means 100%. This is the just one of purposes for Taiwan government authorities to consider if it is necessary to get initiative cooperation with foreign countries. It is true that high speed rail road transportation is pretty high level technological. Taiwan did need help and want to learn more from others, such as France or Japan, by that time, especially in subsequent technology services.
It's interesting how they've fed clips of a train driver into this high speed clip - how they've tried to pass off a train driver as a high speed driver.
Nevertheless, I want to see a white guy driving the train (being passed off as the high speed) in the promotional ad because a) that's the truth b) it will better reflect the changing demographic of this country. What I mean is this: we're taking over.
HaHaHa...
That is a great way of attracting traffic to your blog.
As you can probably tell, it's a small production, with a mandate of amusing the blog author. Everything else is secondary.
This is a video of a test run conducted by the rolling stock manufacturer - Taiwan Shinkansen. The driver is Japanese.
I sincerely didn't mean anything by this post except to take a bit of a piss. But interesting . . . how do you know that it's a test run conducted by the manufacturer? Is it presented as such?
Look at the dates on the video. In early 2006 there were complaints that the Japanese engineers from JR would only allow the Taiwanese to observe rather actually drive the trains.
http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2006/04/25/2003304444
Anon,
You are amazingly observant; I'm impressed.
I read through the link you provided. This line strikes me as strange: "Ho added that the majority of the bullet train tracks had been constructed by the Japanese companies, except the Taipei-Banciao (板橋) section which was built by an Australian firm." The reason it seems weird is that my father-in-law worked on the line for quite a while down in Tainan and he's Taiwanese, not Japanese. He was working for the Canadian company Bombardier. I remember this because when he told me, it was on the heels of the scandal involving the company and then-Canadian PM Jean Chretian.
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