Taiwan Today

Railway enthusiasts in Taiwan have a hard time finding old-time visual records of the island’s railway system, especially pictures between 1949 and 1987, when Taiwan was under martial law. Railways were considered critical strategic infrastructure at the time and photography was strictly prohibited. Earlier this year, however, many local train buffs were thrilled to see some of the missing links restored with the publication of a photo book entitled The Taiwan Railway: 1966–1970 by American photographer Loren Aandahl. “It’s not just about Taiwan railways but also about Taiwan history,” Aandahl says. “I hope this photographic gift evokes many personal memories of trips taken on these trains and helps people in Taiwan appreciate their history.”

Bringing together 203 color photos and 32 black-and-white images of steam and diesel locomotives and railcars, mountain routes and bridges, the 176-page book is divided into six chapters dedicated to railway scenes in different parts of Taiwan. Most of the photos were taken by Aandahl, while there are 39 from other sources, including 12 borrowed from the Government Information Office, which was one of the few privileged agencies that were allowed to take such photos under martial law.

Aandahl, who now lives in Minnesota, came to Taiwan in 1954 with his missionary parents and two of his three sisters. The family arrived at Keelung Harbor and traveled by train to their new home in Hsinchu City, northern Taiwan. While Aandahl, who was just 18 months old at the time, was probably too young to remember anything, his father wrote in his diary of how fascinated and excited the boy was on his first train ride in Taiwan.

Crush on Trains

As Aandahl’s parents began their missionary work, they hired a woman to look after their son. He remembers her real name as Mrs. Chou, but called her Ha because she was always smiling. Ha soon knew that for some reason, the little boy had a crush on trains, so she started to take him to watch trains at a railway crossing near their residence. Six hours of train spotting—three in the morning and another three in the afternoon—soon became their happy daily routine. Aandahl recalls that even when he was attending Chinese kindergarten, Ha still managed to take him to the tracks regularly.

Train watching became train riding in 1959, when Aandahl started attending boarding school at Morrison Academy in Taichung City, central Taiwan. “I rode the line every or every other weekend for 11 years,” he recalls. “Even today on the Mountain Line, I remember every curve, every tunnel, every bridge, every station and which side the token exchange was on.” What fascinated him most as a young boy, Aandahl recalls, was that token system, a safety procedure put in place along the single-line railway between Zhunan in Miaoli County and Taichung at the time. The system was designed to prevent trains from running into each other on the single set of tracks. It required train drivers to take possession of a designated object—the token—from a signalman or token exchange point before starting down the line. If one train was already operating on the line, its driver would have the token, and other trains would have to wait until the token was returned before proceeding. The tokens were attached to large hoops so that train drivers could pick them up and give them back from moving trains. “It was incredible to stand in the front of the train and watch the conductor toss off and pick up the tablet hoop with his arm when the train is going very fast,” he says. “As a little boy, you never forget something like that.”

Having become very familiar with the trip over the years, Aandahl started to take pictures as a high school student after he got his own camera. Although there were railway police in train stations and military troops guarding major bridges and tunnels, Aandahl had his ways of getting around the restrictions. “It was basically a cat-and-mouse situation,” he says. “I knew good locations for taking photos and how to avoid the troops because I’d had many traveling experiences between Hsinchu and Taichung for many years.” The photo on the front cover of The Taiwan Railway: 1966–1970, which features a Mountain Line train crossing a bridge between Miaoli County’s Taian Station and Shenghsing Station, is an example of how the mouse managed to dodge the cat. Aandahl explains that there were five tunnels along the stretch of track and there were soldiers guarding all the tunnels and bridges, except for between the last two tunnels where the terrain was extremely rough. Aandahl climbed up the steep cliff and took the picture on March 15, 1969.

There were also times Aandahl was spotted while taking pictures. When he saw the police or soldiers coming, he would simply put down his camera and say hi to them. Sometimes they would just ask him to leave. Sometimes they would question him, however, and Aandahl would pretend that he could not speak or understand Mandarin. “They got frustrated because of the language barriers and let me go,” Aandahl recalls. “If I were Taiwanese, I would certainly have gotten into big trouble.”

The tricks did not always work, however. In September 1969, after somehow learning that Aandahl had taken a picture of one of the locomotives and its conductor, the Hsinchu station police got so upset that they went to the family’s home. While the young Aandahl was away at boarding school, the police demanded that his father give them all his pictures. “My father refused to give them the pictures,” Aandahl says. “He told them that I was not a spy but just a boy who loved photography and asked them to leave me alone.” The police came back twice within a few days’ time, insistent on confiscating his photos, but were unsuccessful as Aandahl’s father had hidden them somewhere else.

Neither the young Aandahl’s passion for railways nor his parents’ attitude of encouraging their son’s interest in trains as well as the people and other aspects of life in Taiwan were affected by the incident. They took him on many trips around the island, during which he took most of the photographs in the book. When Aandahl left Taiwan in 1970 for a college education in the United States, he took around 1,000 slides with him. “I didn’t know that I’d someday publish a book,” Aandahl says. “But I knew that the pictures were very special, simply because there wasn’t any other railfans in Taiwan. There was only one—me.”

After earning his MBA from the University of British Columbia in 1979, Aandahl entered the transportation industry. Now, after working for most of his career for two airlines, he can still take advantage of cheap air tickets to revisit Taiwan once every several years. Train tours and photography are always part of these visits. And over the years, Aandahl has become good friends with local railfans, as well as located some old friends. Earlier this year, he met with 85-year-old Cheng Wan-jin, who joined the Taiwan Railway Administration in 1942 and had probably worked on many of the trains Aandahl traveled on decades ago. Cheng, whom Aandahl calls a “living legend,” is now supervising the restoration of the largest steam locomotive in Taiwan, a behemoth known as DT668, to make it ready for the Republic of China’s centennial celebrations. During his trip to Taiwan in November 2010, Aandahl also met with 82-year-old Chen Chun-lai, who is one of the engineers in a photo from Aandahl’s book. Although Chen does not recall Aandahl’s face, he does remember that there was a young foreigner who tried to take pictures while sneaking around the train station.

Much of the credit for Chen and Aandahl’s “reunion” goes to railfan Hayato Chiou. Chiou and Aandahl “met” in early 2010, when Chiou was writing a story about the history of Taiwan’s diesel locomotives for local magazine Biographical Literature and needed some photos to go with it. He thought of a picture of an R71 diesel locomotive he had seen, traced it back to Aandahl and, thanks to the help of modern information technology, reached the photographer through Aandahl’s Facebook page. Aandahl provided Chiou with several photos for his story, including one with two engineers standing in front of a train. After months of asking around without even a name to start with, Chiou located Chen—one of the engineers—and made the reunion happen. “The first thing I noticed on his Facebook page was that he calls Hsinchu his hometown,” Chiou says. “I thought it’d be great if I could help a ‘fellow countryman’ find his old friends.”

During their many online discussions, Chiou also realized that Aandahl was holding many valuable images of Taiwan’s railways. “I told him that his photos represent a special period of Taiwanese history that was seldom evidenced through images, and it’d be great if he’d be willing to share them with the Taiwanese people,” Chiou says, adding that he actually knows a few retired government photographers and journalists who had the privilege to take such pictures and are still holding them. “Having the pictures is one thing and sharing them is another,” he says. “Sharing, unfortunately, is something you seldom see in Taiwan’s railfan circles.”

A few days later, when Aandahl asked Chiou’s opinion about publishing a photo book, Chiou was thrilled by the idea, but admits that he initially had doubts about Aandahl’s decision to publish the book in English. “A photo book about Taiwan’s railway system under martial law was brilliant, but an English book about Taiwan’s railways didn’t sound like a good idea from a marketing point of view,” Chiou says. Aandahl later persuaded Chiou that photography is all about the photographer’s emotional connection to the images, and that by using his mother tongue, he could best translate his feelings into words.

But while Aandahl was working hard and making good progress on the editorial details of the book in the United States, Chiou was having trouble finding any interested printing houses in Taiwan. “Very few publishing houses do railway-related publications,” Chiou says. “For one reason or another, none of them was interested in this project.” Chiou explained the situation to Aandahl, who decided to finance the publication of the book himself. That effort resulted in the publication of The Taiwan Railway: 1966–1970 in March this year.

According to Chiou, 1,800 of the 2,000 copies from the first printing have been made available for sale in Taiwan. The results have been encouraging, as nearly 700 copies were sold in the first month-and-a–half after the book’s release.

“It’s difficult to get even black-and-white pictures of the railways from back then, yet most of the photos in the book are in color,” said Ju Lai-shun, director of Taiwan Railway Administration’s Catering Service Department, upon receiving the book. “These are very important images for Taiwan’s railway culture.” And for many railfans, Aandahl’s book helps them “visualize” what they previously only knew about through text. For example, the book includes pictures taken by Aandahl’s mother of a serious railway accident in Hsinchu in 1963. The accident was documented, but there had not been any images of it released until Aandahl’s book was published.

Old-School Slides

In addition to the valuable images, the book also surprises readers with its detailed written descriptions of the photos. Aandahl says he was able to write such complete captions thanks to his use of old-school slides, which allowed him to write details about the shots directly on the frames. In fact, while most photographers have shifted to taking digital images, Aandahl is still much more comfortable with film cameras. “With slides, you keep them in a box and you know where they are,” he says. “But you may lose digital images as computers crash or the data may become unreadable as technology advances.” He notes that there are many talented photographers in Taiwan who have taken beautiful pictures, and says it would be a shame if these images were lost because of technical problems. One of those problems could be a change in digital formats, and in light of how suddenly it became nearly impossible to find a computer with a slot for floppy disks, Aandahl makes a good point.

On the back cover of Aandahl’s’ book are two pictures of diesel railcars that were taken at Hsinchu Station in 1955 and 1970, bookending the author’s childhood years there. The railcars hauling passengers back then are no longer in service today and the scenery in the photos has changed. But come another good day for taking pictures, Aandahl will jump on another train. With a trusty camera loaded with good old slide film, his railway adventure continues.

Write to Jim Hwang at jim@mail.gio.gov.tw