Re: Narrow Gauge Logging Line Remnant

When I first saw the video "Abandoned forest railway Taiping Shan, Yilan county", I jumped to the conclusion that this was one of the logging spurs from Alishan in the high mountains of Taiwan. Alishan is at an elevation of 7,300 ft, close to Mount Yushan, the highest mountain in Taiwan at an elevation of about 13,000 feet (variously given as 12,965 ft or 13,114 ft), and is located on the east side of the range. A little research turned up that the Taiping Mountain Forest Railway is further north and on the west side of the range. It had a gauge of 2ft 6 in and a length of 22.6 miles. Only 2 miles are operable for a diesel powered tourist train taking hikers to trail heads. Maximum grades were just a little over 2 percent, compared to Alishan's 6.26 percent.

So the shay locomotives were never associated with this logging railroad, and were confined to the Alishan system. As a result I decided to re-post some of the Alishan route and shay info on an independent thread (however the NGDF had different ideas so it is a continuation of this thread)



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/07/2019 09:45PM by Olaf Rasmussen.