The South-Link Line

Taiwan's railway runs round the island, and for most of a century it did not. The mountains come down to the sea at the southern tip and there was no way through them, so the west coast network and the east coast network were two railways that never met. The South-Link Line is the piece that joined them: ninety-eight kilometres from Fangliao on the Taiwan Strait to Taitung on the Pacific, cut through the last of the Central Mountain Range in thirty-six tunnels, and the last main line Taiwan ever built.

It took eleven years. Work began in 1980, the ceremonial opening was held on 16 December 1991, the inspectors failed it, and regular trains did not run until January 1992. What they had built was a railway almost nobody lives on. Between Fangliao and Dawu there are four stations in forty-four kilometres and the fast trains stop at none of them; the line spends that stretch inside the mountain, in tunnels laid end to end, rising at two parts in a thousand to a summit of 175 metres inside the 8,070-metre Central Tunnel — for twelve years the longest railway tunnel in Taiwan. Then it comes out on the east side above the Pacific and stays there, on a ledge between the surf and the hillside, all the way to Taitung.

The operator calls it the Smiling Curve, and it is the only line in Taiwan from which you see both oceans. It is also the last place in the country where you can ride a train with the window open: one working each way, every day, in half-century-old blue carriages with ceiling fans and no air conditioning.

Fangliao is where the western railway stops being western. It is the last town on the Pingtung plain, a fishing port with a station that handles the change of scene: everything north of it is flat, farmed and busy, everything east of it is mountain. Trains from Kaohsiung and Taipei run in, the Breezy Blue is made up in the yard, and the line turns inland.

The first five kilometres are still level, through mango orchards, and then comes the strangest structure on the railway. Between Jialu and Neishi the track disappears into 1,180 metres of concrete tunnel built on completely flat ground — the Jiahe Covered Way, the only tunnel in Taiwan's railway system with no hill on top of it. The navy and the air force used a firing range on this coast for live coastal bombardment practice, and the covered way was built so a shell could not hit a train. By the time the line opened the range had been moved and it had nothing to protect against. It is still there, still used, and it does now keep the worst of the downslope winter wind off the track.

Into the mountain

Fangshan, thirteen kilometres out, is the southernmost railway station in Taiwan. It has no staff and no ticket office, a footbridge, and a view west over the Taiwan Strait; the limited expresses go straight through. Seven kilometres further on is Fangye, which is not a station at all in the sense of being somewhere you can get off. It is a signal box with a building and no platform, and it does three jobs: it lets trains pass each other, it works the Central Signal Station remotely, and it watches the wind gauge on Fangye No. 2 Bridge. That bridge is the only one on the Taiwanese network with wind netting and an anemometer on it, and above twenty-five metres a second Fangye stops the trains.

Then the Central Tunnel. It was started in March 1984 and finished in August 1991 — six years and nine months for 8,070 metres under Chaliufan Mountain, driven first by heading and then, when the rock turned out to be bad, by the New Austrian method. It is dead straight, it is the only double-track section of the whole railway, and it is where the line crosses from Pingtung County into Taitung County and from one side of Taiwan to the other. There is nothing to see. That is rather the point: the two halves of the island are ten minutes apart inside a hole in the dark, and every attempt to get between them before this took a day.

The Pacific side

The train comes out at Guzhuang, drops through a string of shorter tunnels and arrives at Dawu, the first real town in fifty minutes and the only intermediate stop every train makes. From here the railway is a coast railway. It runs on a shelf cut into the hillside with the sea immediately below it, ducking into headlands and out again, crossing the Dawu, Jinlun and Taimali rivers on long concrete viaducts that stand on the beach.

The set piece is Duoliang. The station closed in 2006 and was pulled out of the timetable, but the platform is still there, hanging above a black shingle beach with nothing between it and the water, and the roof was turned into a viewing deck. It is now the most visited place in Taitung County — an abandoned railway station, with a NT$10 turnstile, where people come to watch other people's trains go by.

Below Duoliang the line was moved seaward in May 2020 to get the clearance for the overhead wires, so the newest stretch of it is also the closest to the Pacific. Jinlun sits at a river mouth with hot springs up the valley behind it; Taimali is the town under the daylily mountain; Zhiben is the hot-spring resort; and at Kangle the mountains finally let go and the train runs into Taitung across flat ground. The whole thing takes an hour and a quarter behind an EMU3000, or three hours and seven minutes behind a diesel with the windows down.

What changed in 2020

For its first twenty-eight years this was a diesel railway, and it was the last one. On 22 December 2020 the final unairconditioned ordinary train left Fangliao; the next day the electrification opened, the last mile of Taiwan's round-island scheme, and the modern tilting expresses came over the mountain for the first time. The blue carriages went to a works at Nanzhou, were rebuilt, and came back on 23 October 2021 as the Breezy Blue. Both things are true at once, which is why the railway has a good documentary about it — Hsiao Chu-chen's On The Train, released in June 2023 and the first feature-length railway documentary made in Taiwan.

Fifteen trains a day run each way between Fangliao and Taitung from Monday to Friday, and sixteen eastbound on a Saturday. They start before six in the morning and the last one east leaves Fangliao at 22:36. Almost all of them are through workings from somewhere much further away — Xinzuoying, Chaozhou, Taichung, Shulin, Hualien — so Fangliao is a stop on a long journey rather than the start of one, and nothing terminates there.

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.

The fast way: 1 hour 16 minutes

The Tze-Chiang 3000 Express is the EMU3000 tilting train, and it is the reason the crossing now takes an hour and a quarter. It calls at Fangliao, Dawu, Jinlun, Taimali, Zhiben and Taitung and nothing else, so the run from Fangliao to Dawu — forty-four kilometres and the whole mountain — is twenty-nine minutes without a stop.

Eastbound departures from Fangliao are at 06:24, 06:28, 07:56, 08:02, 10:11, 10:17, 11:51, 12:29, 13:42, 15:52, 17:04, 18:30, 19:56, 21:14 and 22:36; on Saturdays a Puyuma Express is added at 09:34. Westbound from Taitung they leave at 05:52, 06:20, 07:16, 08:37, 10:14, 11:08, 12:35, 13:41, 14:13, 15:17, 17:00, 17:30, 18:33, 19:30 and 20:50.

The slow way: every station

One train a day each way still calls everywhere, including Jialu and Neishi, which nothing else does. It is the Chu-Kuang Express, the old locomotive-hauled class, and it takes two hours seventeen minutes eastbound.

The Fast Local Train (區間快) is the cheap middle option — about an hour and fifty minutes, unreserved, four or five a day, calling at every station except Neishi and sometimes Longxi.

The Breezy Blue

The tourist train runs one working each way, every day, as Ordinary Train 5899 down and 5898 up. It is not on the ordinary timetable and it is not sold as an ordinary ticket — see Tickets below. These times took effect on 1 July 2026.

Those long stands are deliberate: twenty minutes at Jialu, twenty at Dawu, twenty-nine at Taimali going east, and a full hour at Jinlun coming back. Three hours seven minutes east, three hours twenty-two west, for a journey the express does in seventy-six minutes.

Check before you travel on the operator's own English pages: Taiwan Railway Corporation (opens in a new tab), and for the tourist train its own timetable (opens in a new tab).

Ordinary trains are straightforward. Fangliao to Taitung was NT$313 on a Tze-Chiang 3000 Express in September 2026, NT$241 on the Chu-Kuang and NT$201 on a Fast Local, with the concession fare at half. The EMU3000 and the Puyuma are reserved and should be booked, particularly in summer and at holidays, when this is the only rail route to Taitung that does not go the long way round the island; the Fast Local is unreserved and you simply get on.

The Breezy Blue is a different product. It is not sold at the ticket window: the operator has given the concession to a tour company, and you buy a package rather than a fare — NT$799 one way, NT$1,399 for the same-day return. It sells out at weekends and in the daylily season.

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.

For this journey alone it is not worth buying. A Tze-Chiang fare from Fangliao to Taitung is NT$313, so a three-day pass has to cover almost eight such rides before it pays, and nobody rides the South-Link Line eight times. What it is worth buying for is the thing the South-Link Line made possible: a lap of the island. Fangliao–Taitung is one leg of a round-island circuit that also takes in the North-Link Line down the Pacific cliffs and the Taitung Line through the East Rift Valley, and on that trip a five-day pass is comfortably ahead.

Four conditions matter. Reserved-seat trains still need a reservation — Puyuma, Taroko, Tze-Chiang Limited Express EMU3000 and group trains — which you make at a station counter with the pass in your hand, and you then travel on both documents together. 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 it is not valid on sightseeing trains, which rules out the Breezy Blue on this line.

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

This is not a line to hop along. Eleven stations in ninety-eight kilometres, a train every hour or so and nothing at all between Fangliao and Dawu — get off at the wrong one and you wait. The sensible shape of a trip here is two or three nights strung along the eastern half, where the stops are close together and each has a reason to stay, with the mountain crossing ridden straight through in either direction.

The stops below run west to east. One of them, Duoliang, has no trains at all: the station shut in 2006 and you reach it by road from Taimali or Dawu. It is still the busiest place on the railway.

The two ends of this line are the two places to sleep on it, and they are very different propositions. Fangliao is a working fishing town with one modern hotel on the seafront, two minutes' walk from the station, and it is the right base if you want to be on the first Breezy Blue of the morning without a dawn start. Taitung and the hot-spring valley at Zhiben, seventy minutes further on, are where the accommodation actually is — a whole resort town of it, developed since the Japanese colonial period around water that comes out of the ground clear and odourless.

In between there is very little, and what there is clusters at Jinlun. The hot springs there are ten minutes by road from the station up a side valley, and the guesthouses are small, family-run and mostly bookable only by telephone or LINE, which is why none is listed here. The three below were opened and read in September 2026.