If in all the world there's a more difficult place to build a railroad than the northeast coast of Taiwan, civil engineers of the Republic of China would like to know about it.
The North Bend rail project will connect the rugged, little-developed eastern part of Taiwan with the populous, industrialized west. Some 2,000 engineers and skilled workmen have been engaged in this construction for well over three years. The railroad runs close to the sea from Hualien, the most important east coast port, and past the present small fishing port of Suao to connect at Nan Sheng-hu with the present main line to Taipei and west coast cities. The distance is 82.3 kilometers (about 55 miles), plus a 5.8-kilometer extension to Hualien Harbor.
Almost as ambitious a project in the same area is the conversion of Suao from a sleepy fishing village of a few thousand people into a major seaport. This will take pressure off the port of Keelung, near the Taiwan metropolis of Taipei, where ships often must wait outside the harbor entrance for their turn to come in and unload or take on cargo.
Both the North Bend Railway and Suao Harbor are being built by the Ret-Ser Engineering Agency of the Vocational Assistance Commission for Retired Servicemen (commonly known as VACRS). I toured both projects on a week-end trip, escorted by C. K. Chen of the Ret-Ser public information staff in Taipei and Wang Cheng-mei of the administrative staff in Suao.
The Vocational Assistance Commission for Retired Servicemen had its inception in 1954, five years after Chinese Communist usurpation of the mainland and the withdrawal of free Chinese forces to the island province of Taiwan. Most of the men had no families in Taiwan. The government recognized its obligation to help them adjust to civilian life when their military service ended.
Over a period of 23 years, VACRS has assisted nearly 300,000 retired servicemen, mostly through jobs in productive enterprises and sometimes by lending "seed money" to start new businesses, most of which succeed. The commission supervises more than 100 veterans' enterprises in more than 50 different fields.
Ret-Ser, the engineering agency branch of VACRS, does things on a bigger scale than the other enterprises. The Cross-Island Highway from Taichung, near the Taiwan Straits, to Hualien, including the section through the famed Taroko Gorge, was built by Ret-Ser men and remains one of their most impressive accomplishments. The highway has two main forks, covers 260 miles and has 80 tunnels and 130 bridges. It reaches a high point of 3,275 meters - 10,743 feet. Thirty-eight of the tunnels are chiseled out of the walls of Taroko Gorge west of Hualien, many with windows looking down on the tumbling little river that has cut its way through solid granite and marble. More than 10,000 men worked on the Cross-Island Highway and 416 died in construction accidents.
Since then, Ret-Ser has carried out more than 2,700 projects, many of them very large, both in Taiwan and overseas. The agency regularly bids on construction contracts in many countries of the non-Communist world. It built a housing project for the U.S. Navy on the Pacific island of Guam and dredged Diego Garcia Harbor for the new U.S. Navy Indian Ocean station on an island leased from Britain. Ret-Ser engineers built or are building highways in Indonesia, Thailand, Saudi Arabia and Jordan, and are building a new Red Sea port for Saudi Arabia.
Ret-Ser is deeply involved in all but two of the Big Ten projects that are changing the face of Taiwan. Ret-Ser personnel are doing all the work on the North Bend Railway - possibly the most difficult job they have ever tackled - and on the new harbors at Suao and at Taichung on Taiwan's west central coast.
I made the trip from Taipei to Suao by train. It's a pleasant journey through Dan and small industrial towns interspersed with rice paddies in which the green rows of the 1977 spring crop stood erect in the glistening water, while here and there an efficient waterwheel lifted water from stream to paddy. Water buffalo plastered thick with mud pulled plows to prepare for later plantings. This route passes through rolling hills and tunnels.
The end of the Taipei-Suao railroad line is now in a hollow of hills out of sight of the ocean. The fishing harbor, jammed with small boats, opens on the Pacific a short distance away. Many boats were beached for repairs. I was told that the waters off the Pacific coast of Taiwan provide some of the best commercial fishing anywhere. A seafood restaurant where we ate lunch had a display case filled with a wide variety of specimens that soon would come to the table in edible form.
Conveyor moves dirt down a hillside high above Suao Harbor to provide for filled land at the port's edge. (File photo)
The cost of Suao Harbor was estimated at NT$5,600 billion (nearly US$150 million) and that of the North Bend Railway at NT$5,060 billion at the time construction started. Both projects will cost considerably more because of inflation and the difficulties encountered.
The project engineer for harbor construction is Wang Shao-chee, concurrently professor of civil engineering at Chung Yuan College of Science and Engineering. He assigned his deputy, C. M. Lin, and another young engineer, Hsu Ru-chu, to show us the impressive results of what has been done so far.
One of the difficulties in building Suao Harbor is rough water. The Pacific is the "typhoon side" of Taiwan. Even the big windstorms that don't reach the island stir up waves that make any work on or in the water impossible. Engineer Hsu said the "impossible working days" add up to about 150 a year.
The harbor site is a natural inlet between headlands. Hills rise steeply on both sides. Tasks include deepening of the channel to permit accommodation of larger ships and construction of outer and inner breakwaters so that the harbor will remain relatively calm no matter how heavy the Pacific seas. Wharves are being built where oceangoing vessels can tie up and safely load and unload cargo.
Deepening of the harbor from an average of 6 meters to 7½ meters involved dredging 2 million cubic meters of sand and rock from the bottom with the use of five floating cranes. The material was dumped in shallow water to build up land reaching the docksides. Three of the large carriers used to move the rocks dump from the sides, giving the impression that they will surely capsize.
Material dredged from the bottom is not nearly enough for building up the land needed at Suao Harbor. A "mountain to the sea" conveyor belt with total length of more than 300 meters carries dirt from a hillside high above the port over a highway and down a slope to a point near the fill. This material is quickly hauled away by some 40 ten-ton dumptrucks. By the time the fill is finished, some 5,500,000 cubic meters of earth will have been moved by conveyor. The newly-created land amounts to about 800,000 square meters.
1 was told that plans call for the building of a naval hospital in the hollow of the hillside being excavated to provide the harbor fill. It is a beautiful location overlooking the port and the Pacific.
Huge caissons are built in drydoclcs and towed to their place in the breakwaters protecting Suao Harbor. (File photo)
Sixty-six huge hollow concrete "building blocks" called caissons are being used in building of 2,320 meters of breakwaters to protect Suao Harbor from the sea. They measure 25x25x22 meters and appear to be as solid as bedrock when fitted together almost as precisely as fine masonry work and filled with sand and gravel.
Even this isn't enough to calm the angry sea. The breakwaters are further reinforced by grotesque "tetrapods" - five-pointed concrete creations resembling gigantic versions of a child's "jackstones.'" They weigh from 1 to 40 tons each and add mighty strength when laid alongside the breakwaters with points interlocking. The tetrapods are made nearby.
At Taichung Harbor on the west side of Taiwan, which I had visited earlier, the caissons are made on the beach. Then the sand is excavated from around them so they float free and are moved by tug boats to where they are needed. There isn't available beach at Suao. So the caissons are built in floating drydocks near the north side of the harbor, then towed to the breakwaters.
A new entrance to the fishing harbor, also protected from the open sea by 300 meters of breakwater, will be built before the work at Suao is completed.
Inside the main port, some of the piers are being built on piling driven into the ocean floor after the fashion of bridges. There will be 14 deepwater wharves with berths for handling up to that many ships of 6,000 to 50,000 tons. Two special container piers will be constructed.
The Republic of China's extensive wood industries are supplied in part by timber from the forested Taiwan mountains and in part by large-scale imports of logs. Most of the imports come from the countries of Southeast Asia, notably the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia. All or most will be unloaded at Suao when the special timber pool is ready. This will keep the logs safe from fire and weather-cracking until they are moved to processing plants by rail. The timber pool will have storage capacity of 800,000 tons.
Shallow water wharves will provide dock space for tugs and other harbor craft, as well as for vessels used in handling logs in the timber pool. The deep and shallow water wharves add up to 5,089 meters (nearly 3.2 miles).
Other construction at Suao includes a 900-meter tunnel from the port's lowest point through a hill to the Han plain in the interior. This will accommodate a major highway and help avoid traffic congestion in the harbor area.
Work on both Suao Harbor and the North Bend Railway goes forward in two 10-hour shifts, seven days a week. Most of the workers are on the job daily, except for four days in a row off each month. It's hard work, but most of the men are young and enthusiastic about what they are doing. They are paid relatively well and fed even better. We ate lunch with workers at the messhall of a tunnel project half way down the railroad route.
After seeing what is being done at Suao in landside construction, we toured the harbor by boat to view the prospect from the seaside. Work on the port started in 1974. The first phase of construction, which will permit partial use, is due for completion in 1979. The second phase will be completed in 1982.
There is room for a third phase of additional wharves and berths inside the outer breakwater at the southern end of the port. These will be constructed in the 1980s or later as the economic needs of the Republic of China warrant.
The volume of traffic by completion of phase 2 is estimated at between 5,650,000 and 10,000,000 tons of shipping a year.
We saw one example of the port of Suao already in use. A small mountain of fragrant camphor chips, a byproduct of logs from the forests of Taiwan, was piled up at the edge of one of the new docks to await loading and shipping.
The best view of the North Bend Railway route is from the sea - as I saw it in 1975 from the ferry Hualien on a trip southward from Keelung. The mountains rise so abruptly that there are often wide stretches of almost perpendicular cliffs rising to 1,000 feet or more.
The second best view is from the road the Japanese built along the coast during the half century (1895-1945) they held Taiwan. We traveled it as part of our trip to see what the men bossed by Project Manager C. T. Mi are doing.
Most of the road is only wide enough for one-way traffic. Cars, trucks and buses travel it in convoys. These are stopped from time to time in two-lane areas to await passage of convoys moving in the other direction. The road is winding and in places very rough. At times it swings inland for short distances, penetrating dense growths of giant tree ferns and other tropical vegetation. Most of the road is chiseled out of the mountainside overlooking the Pacific far, far below. Now and then it passes through short tunnels or open-sided shelters cut into the rock. In some places tightly stretched netting along the roadside keeps smaller rocks from falling onto the pavement. Even so, the highway is frequently blocked by landslides, especially in rainy weather.
Now and then the road descends into small, narrow valleys near the mouths of rivers or little streams. Here are located small towns or hamlets of a few houses. Chinese highway crews have widened the road at various points. Eventually this will become a two-way highway for the entire route, although probably not soon. For most people, traveling it will always be something of an adventure.
The idea of a railroad connection between the east and west coasts of Taiwan goes back to Japanese times. But Japan regarded the task as too difficult. The first reconnaissance of the route was carried out in 1947 and the second in 1963. An air survey of the mountainous area and a preliminary ground survey of the rolling terrain were made in 1968. A feasibility study followed in 1971.
With decision that the railroad could be built, although with difficulty, work started with loud firecracker salutes on December 25, 1973, which is Constitution Day in the Republic of China. No one anticipated how great the difficulties would be.
Work began at each end of the route. As expected, construction went fast in the far south beyond the mountains. The first section of the line was completed and opened to use late in 1975. It connects Hualien Harbor with a big new cement plant to the north. The area contains millions of tons of limestone and its crystallized form of marble. The manufacture of cement from limestone is an increasingly important industry.
The 82.3-kilometer railroad will have 35 major bridges with total length of 6,073 meters, 85 minor bridges, culverts with total length of 3,250 meters and 40 tunnels with total length of 29,500 meters. The major bridges, culverts and tunnels add up to nearly half the length of the entire line.
The Ret-Ser people expected to depend heavily on two gigantic American-made mining machines popularly called "Big Johns," which cost nearly US$2 million apiece, for most of the tunnel work. The Big Johns worked well in going through solid limestone or other rock, but once they hit such unexpected formations as loose boulders, they were in trouble. They've now lost most of their popularity with the tunnel crews and have been called, in both English and Chinese, a lot of other names. Neither is now in operation. The fault apparently was not in the machines themselves but in the encountering of conditions for which they were not designed.
Completed stretch of tunnel with track for the train that hauls away the rubble of further excavation. (File photo)
Project Boss Mi was obviously disappointed but not discouraged by the rate of progress. He showed me a long map of the railroad route that occupied most of a wall at a briefing room in Suao headquarters.
"The excavation and grading for the outside railbed is about 85 percent complete," he said. "About 65 per cent of the bridges have been completed - and about 25 per cent of the tunnels."
Seven of the projected tunnels are finished. Work continues from both ends on each of the others, 20 hours a day, 7 days a week, by more conventional means than were visualized when the Big John machines were brought in. Progress is slow but steady and is marked up each day on a chart in the foreman's office at each construction site.
The 2,000 men working on the project include about 300 civil engineers. They are housed and fed at clusters of small buildings of temporary construction, with corrugated aluminum sides and roofs. These structures are strung along the route from Suao to the end of the mountains.
Foreign engineers visit the job sites from time to time for a look at the problems of building a railroad through such difficult terrain. Members of an Italian group were impressed by the way the big problems were being handled. They were also impressed with the chopstick dexterity of the Chinese in the messhall. Italians found these implements most difficult.
Big gantry is moved against the rock face at the end of a tunnel for drilling and emplacing of dynamite. (File photo)
Mi told me the toughest problems are found near the northern end of the route. Geological conditions not indicated by earlier surveys have turned up, especially silt, sand and landslides in the tunnels. After new drillings and tests, about 7,750 meters of the line has been moved back from the seacoast by some 200 meters to an area of greater stability. This part of Taiwan is frequently shaken by earthquakes - not ordinarily strong enough to cause damage but of sufficient intensity to cause concern when you are digging tunnels.
There's special trouble at Tunnel 8 in the northern area
"We're into sand, gravel and boulders 30 meters below the bed of the Tung-ao River," Mi explained. The river is 300 meters wide. It is dry at times; at other times, some of the heavy flow seeps down into the partly built tunnel. The location of this particular tunnel is important because bridges have been completed at each portal.
Mi has called in top engineers from Taipei for consultations on the problems at Tunnel 8. He seemed to have no doubt that the difficulties would be overcome and Tunnel 8 made an integral part of the North Bend Railway.
When construction began at the end of 1973, mid-1978 was set as the expected time for trains to start rolling from Suao to Hualien. That date had to be moved back. But Mi is confident of completion in 1979.
Among the many work sites we visited between Suao and Hualien, that at the south portal of Tunnel 10 near the small town of Nan-ao is fairly typical. Number 10 is the longest tunnel of all - 5,287 meters or about 2½ miles. The day we were there the crew was 640 meters into the mountain.
A critical factor in tunnel building is ventilation. Tunnel 10's air is pumped through a plastic pipe to the deepest point of the work at the rate of 5,000 cubic meters a minute. Another stronger pipe carries compressed air to power tools of the workers.
Near the tunnel entrance is a charger to keep power in the huge batteries of the 90-horsepower "locomotive" that pulls four to six cars along the narrow-gauge rails. These cars carry dirt and rock from the tunnel head.
A Japanese-built "jumbo gantry" also runs on the track. It has work platforms at two levels and is lined up against the face of the rock at the excavation's end. Four workmen using air pressure drills bore 15 holes into the rock, following a pattern decided by explosives engineers. It is a very noisy operation.
Four times each 20-hour work day, on the average, boring is completed and the holes are tamped full of some 400 sticks of dynamite. The gantry is moved back to a safe distance and the dynamite exploded by a detonator outside the tunnel. The little train then moves in under the gantry and workmen quickly load the cars with rubble that can be used for fills elsewhere on the line. The gantry moves to the new rock face and the operation begins all over again.
One blast ordinarily deepens the tunnel by a meter and a half - the four in a day by six meters. Six meters in a tunnel length of 5,286 meters may not seem like much, but it's progress to be marked up on the chart at the end of each day. Then, too, another crew is working southward from the north portal of Tunnel 10 at about the same rate.
Lining of the tunnel with prefabricated steel forms and cement quickly follows the excavation. This usually seals out water seepage. The cement is mixed outside and pumped to workers through an overhead pipe. Of course, conditions vary somewhat from tunnel to tunnel.
Meter by meter, the work of building the North Bend Railway moves steadily forward.
It is anticipated that a direct rail connection from Taipei to Hualien and easy access to Taroko Gorge will prove instantly popular. The land route by train and bus now takes eight hours or longer, provided the narrow coastal highway is open. The scenic but longer route from Hualien to Taichung via the Cross-Island Highway takes 12 hours or more. Air travel, which pours thousands of visitors into Hualien every weekend, takes only about 30 minutes flying time from Taipei but is fairly expensive. So is the scenic but slow voyage down the coast from Keelung by ferry. The train trip from Taipei to Hualien will take less than five hours.
Passenger volume is expected to increase by 10 per cent annually. Freight is estimated at 1,500 metric tons daily in the first year, 2,000 tons in the second year and 3,000 in the third. Growth is expected to be 6 per cent annually thereafter.
A narrow-gauge railroad serving local needs extends southward some 125 miles from Hualien to the port of Taitung near the end of Taiwan's Pacific coast. This will be widened to standard gauge by the time the North Bend road is completed. Trains from Taipei and the west coast will be able to go all the way to Taitung. A South Bend Railway connecting Taitung with Kaohsiung, Taiwan's second city, is planned for the 1980s to complete a line around the island. There's a strong likelihood Ret-Ser will get the contract.
The North Bend Railway is expected to bring rapid growth to the thinly populated east coast. Taiwan province is the most densely populated area on the earth with an average of more than 450 people per square kilometer. Hualien hsien, the largest of Taiwan's 16 counties, has a population density of only about 80 per square kilometer. The North Bend Railway is certain to bring changes in that figure.
Arable land is scarce on the east side of the mountains, but there is intensive use of what is available. Some of Taiwan's best pineapple production comes from the Taitung area.
Hualien is one of the world's foremost producers of marble. The Ret-Ser agency operates the biggest of several marble plants, producing ornamental slabs for buildings as well as a big array of other articles ranging from small vases to pieces of furniture.
There are gold, copper and other mineral deposits on the Pacific side of Taiwan. The railroad connection with the west will encourage mining and make possible improved development of forestry under principles of conservation.
The east coast has hot springs and a good potential for mountain resorts. Beaches on the Pacific are superior to those across the island on the Taiwan Straits.
The traveler who rides the train through all those tunnels the Ret-Ser crews are digging won't see much of the spectacular mountain scenery. He'll be underground too much of the time. Resorts at or near the small village stops along the railroad should eventually take care of that.