The Jiji Line

Nantou is the only county in Taiwan with no coastline, and the Jiji Line is the only railway it has. Twenty-nine and a half kilometres run east from Ershui on the western trunk line, up the north bank of the Zhuoshui River, through seven stations to Checheng — a timber village in a bowl of hills below Sun Moon Lake. It is the longest branch line the national operator still works, and the least like the rest of the network: single track, no overhead wires, one diesel railcar at a time, and a brass tablet handed to the driver at the station window as the authority to enter the section ahead.

It was not built for passengers. In 1919 the Taiwan Power Company needed to move cement and machinery up to the Sun Moon Lake hydroelectric scheme, and laid a railway along the course of an existing push-car track. Construction finished in 1921 and the line opened to the public on 14 January 1922; the colonial railway bureau bought it in 1927. Then came the timber. Checheng became a logging town, the cypress off Mount Danda went out by rail, and the bananas of the Jiji basin went with it. When the logging was banned and the road took the freight, the railway ran at a loss, and in 1986 the operator announced that it would close. The towns along it refused, and in 1994 the line was relaunched as a tourist railway — the first in Taiwan.

What has happened since is the reason to go now. The 1999 Chichi earthquake, whose epicentre was at Jiji, twisted the track and tilted the station; the line reopened in January 2001. A hillside came down on a tunnel in August 2021 and took the far end of the branch out of service for nearly five years. Trains ran the whole way again from 25 June 2026.

The branch begins at platform 2 of Ershui, a junction town on the Changhua plain where the main line from Taipei runs south under its wires towards Chiayi and Kaohsiung. The railcar waiting on the far face is not part of that world. It is a 45DR1000 — a two-to-four-car diesel unit in orange and cream, designed by Nippon Sharyo, the first two built in Japan and the other thirty-four assembled at the Tang Eng ironworks in Kaohsiung, in traffic since 2 December 1998 and based at Changhua depot. Three hundred and eighty-five horsepower, air-conditioned, good for 110 km/h and never anywhere near it. There is no third rail and no catenary over the branch; from here to Checheng the engine under the floor is the whole power supply.

Where two trains meet

Yuanquan, 2.9 kilometres out, is an unstaffed halt beside the paddy. Then the line swings inland along the Zhuoshui River — the longest in Taiwan, and the reason everything here is called after muddy water — and at kilometre 10.8 reaches Zhuoshui, which is the hinge of the whole operation.

The Jiji Line is single track from end to end and has exactly one passing loop, at Zhuoshui. Every train stops there for two to five minutes whether or not anyone gets off, because that is where the up train and the down train pass each other, and because that is where the tablet changes hands. Block working here is still done with the electric train tablet: a brass disc in a hooped carrier, withdrawn from a cabinet that the station masters at the two ends of the section must operate together, handed to the driver, and surrendered at the far end. Only one tablet can be out of the pair of instruments at a time, so only one train can be in the section. Different sections use tablets with differently shaped centres, so a driver cannot be given the wrong one. The operator's own engineering pages name the Jiji and Pingxi lines as the last two places it is still worked.

Camphors, and an army siding

From Zhuoshui to Longquan the railway runs beside County Road 152 for four and a half kilometres under an avenue of camphor trees — the Green Tunnel, more than a thousand of them, planted in the Japanese period and kept alive, the scenic-area authority records, by villagers who carried water to them daily. The road and the railway share the shade; the train is slow enough that cyclists on the parallel path keep pace with it.

Longquan itself is a halt with a shelter, a lawn and a row of red lanterns. Just before it a siding curves away into the trees to the army's ordnance readiness centre — the only freight connection left on the branch, and worked occasionally at night.

Jiji, and the tunnels that shut the line

Jiji is the middle of the line and the reason most people come. The wooden station, rebuilt in 1933 in the Japanese style, is one of very few of its kind left in Taiwan and is listed as a historic building; the 1999 earthquake left it leaning, and it was restored. The earthquake is named after this town.

East of Jiji the line enters the hills, and the seven tunnels through them are the branch's weak point. Six were bored in 1925 and a seventh added in 1960; the 1999 earthquake cracked them and let water in, and the repairs of 2010–11 lined them in steel and widened them by a hand's breadth. It was not enough. In August 2021 a slope above tunnel No. 2 slid and deformed the lining, and the section beyond Jiji closed. Five landslides followed. The eventual answer was a wholesale rebuild of the tunnels and the slopes above them, and for two of those years the trains terminated at Zhuoshui and a bus ran the rest.

The end of the line

Shuili, 27.4 kilometres out, is the largest town on the branch and the place to change for the bus to Sun Moon Lake or to the Yushan trailheads. Then the line leaves the Zhuoshui for a tributary, climbs a little, runs through the last tunnel and stops.

Checheng is a basin ringed by wooded hills, and the railway ends at a set of buffers with a timber yard behind it. The concrete water tower and the coaling stage from the steam years are still standing at the end of the platform. Fifty minutes and twenty-nine kilometres from the plain, it is about as far into Taiwan as a train will take you.

Eleven trains a day run each way between Ershui and Checheng, and the timetable is the same every day of the week — weekday, Saturday or Sunday. There is no fast train and no slow train: every working calls at all seven stations, and the whole branch takes between forty-eight and fifty-three minutes. Two morning trains and one late-evening train run through to and from Changhua, which saves the change at Ershui.

Times and fares below were read from the operator's own English journey planner on 15 September 2026, for Wednesday 16 and Saturday 19 September 2026. This is the timetable that took effect on 1 July 2026, after the line reopened throughout.

Down the line — Ershui to Checheng

Back up — Checheng to Ershui

Station by station

Two examples, one in each direction. Note the stand at Zhuoshui in both: that is the passing loop, and the up train and the down train are waiting for each other.

Getting to Ershui

Ershui is on the main west coast line and has a frequent local service. From Taichung it is about an hour by Local Train, NT$109. From Taipei the quickest option is a Puyuma Express, about three hours fifteen minutes and NT$634; the all-stations alternative takes nearly four hours for NT$408. Tianzhong, one stop north, is the railhead for the bus to the high-speed line at Changhua.

Check before you travel on the operator's own English pages: Taiwan Railway Corporation (opens in a new tab).

Nothing on this branch is reserved and nothing needs booking. Every train is an unreserved Local Train: you buy at the window and you get on. Ershui to Checheng was NT$64 in September 2026, with the concession fare for children, seniors and disabled passengers at NT$32; Ershui to Jiji, the most common short hop, was NT$43. The two morning through workings from Changhua cost NT$134 for the whole run.

There is no day pass for this line — the operator sells one for the Pingxi and Neiwan branches and not for this one — so getting off at three or four stations means buying three or four tickets. Ershui is the only station on the branch the railway staffs itself. Checheng's ticket window is run by the local community association and opens 08:00 to 17:00, Jiji's by the township office, and Yuanquan and Longquan are unstaffed halts where you simply board and pay at the far end.

The operator's island-wide ticket is TR-PASS, and the general version comes in two lengths: NT$2,400 for three consecutive days and NT$3,200 for five, with children, seniors, disabled passengers and their companions at half — NT$1,200 and NT$1,600. There are longer student versions. Within the validity it covers every class of train, with no limit on zones or trips, and it is sold at Ershui and at Tianzhong, the two stations you are most likely to arrive at.

For this journey alone it is emphatically not worth buying. The whole branch costs NT$64 one way: a three-day pass would have to cover nearly forty end-to-end rides before it paid, and there are only eleven trains a day. What it is worth buying for is the getting here. Ershui is halfway down the west coast, and if the Jiji Line is one stop on a longer trip — Taipei, Taichung, Chiayi, a lap of the island — a pass earns its keep on the trunk line and lets you ride the branch as often as you like on top.

⚠️ There is no local day pass on this line. The operator publishes exactly two branch-line day passes, for Pingxi and for Neiwan, and the Jiji Line is not among them. Older guidebooks and blogs still mention an NT$80 Jiji round-trip pass; it is not on the operator's ticket pages today.

Three conditions matter. The pass has been sold under real-name registration since 15 October 2024, so you buy it in person with a passport or ID card and carry that document with you; a conductor who cannot match the two treats it as travelling without a ticket. You choose the start date when you buy, any day within thirty days of purchase, it runs on consecutive days from there, and it cannot be changed or refunded once that date has begun. And reserved-seat trains still need a reservation — Puyuma, Taroko, Tze-Chiang Limited Express EMU3000 and group trains — which matters for getting to Ershui, not for the branch itself, where nothing is reserved.

Pass prices and conditions were read on the operator's own pages on 15 September 2026, where the conditions were last updated on 4 September 2026: TR-PASS (opens in a new tab).

Thirty kilometres, seven stations and a train every hour and a half or so: this is a branch you can actually work your way along in a day, which is not true of most of the lines on this site. The sensible shape is to ride straight through to Checheng first, then come back westwards stopping where you like, because the far end is the one place worth a couple of unhurried hours and the light is better there in the afternoon.

The stops below run west to east, in the order the down train reaches them.

Most people ride this line as a day trip from Taichung or from Sun Moon Lake, and it works perfectly well that way — the first train down leaves Ershui before six and the last one back reaches Changhua at a quarter to eleven. But the branch rewards a night on it, because the two ends are three-quarters of an hour apart and the places worth walking around are at opposite ends of that.

Jiji is where the accommodation is: a small town with an old street, a night market and several places to stay within a few minutes of the station. Shuili has more of a working-town feel and is the base for Sun Moon Lake and the Yushan trailheads. Checheng has very little, and what it has is a handful of family guesthouses around the log pond — which is exactly why the village goes quiet once the last train has gone.