Taiwan: Cabinet Approves NT$352bn High-Speed Rail Extension to Yilan
Taiwan’s Executive Yuan on 23 July formally approved the High Speed Rail extension from Taipei’s Nangang station to Yilan County, Premier Cho Jung-tai said after a Cabinet meeting, according to the Executive Yuan and Central News Agency.
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications said the 60.6 km line will link HSR Nangang with a planned HSR Yilan station. Journey time is put at about 28 minutes. Railway Bureau Director-General Young Cheng-chung told a Cabinet news conference that the scheme cleared environmental impact assessment in August 2025 and that comprehensive planning was finished in January 2026.
Total cost is NT$352.1 billion (about $10.9bn), covering stations, trains and land acquisition, with completion scheduled for 2037. Young said the Railway Bureau will now begin soliciting private-sector contractors, carrying out urban planning changes, and drafting construction and land-acquisition plans.
Deputy Transportation Minister Wu Sheng-yuan said a new Taiwan Railway station will be built and integrated with the HSR Yilan station near Yilan County Hall so passengers can transfer between systems. The bureau estimates the extension will serve about 27,000 passengers on weekdays and 60,000 at weekends by 2051.
Premier Cho said the project should ease congestion on National Freeway No. 5, improve Taipei–Yilan travel, and raise eastern Taiwan rail capacity. He also said eastern Taiwan has long relied mainly on Taiwan Railway and that the extension adds a high-speed choice and a resilience start for the east coast. Cabinet materials place the Yilan HSR station southeast of the county government complex, with a maintenance depot north of the Lanyang River.
At the same session Cho set out a “four 90-minute” island rail vision: Taipei–Kaohsiung, Kaohsiung–Taitung, Taitung–Hualien and Hualien–Taipei. He said average daily ridership across HSR, Taiwan Railway and metro systems reached 3.524 million trips in 2026.
The other three programmes named were the Kaohsiung–Pingtung HSR extension (26.2 km via Kaohsiung station to Liukuaicuo), Hualien–Taitung double-track electrification (112.6 km single-track section to Zhiben, to open in three stages), and South-Link alignment improvement plus bottleneck double-tracking on the 140.7 km South-Link, where 85 km remain single track and 44 km are classed as bottlenecks. The Cabinet instructed MOTC to keep advancing those packages while launching Yilan procurement and works.