Alishan Forest Railway

The Alishan Forest Railway is one of the great mountain railways of Asia — an 86-kilometre narrow-gauge network that climbs from the plains at Chiayi (30 metres) to the resort at Alishan (2,216 metres), passing through tropical, subtropical, temperate, and cloud-forest zones in a single two-and-a-half-hour journey. The line uses a combination of spiral loops and switchbacks to manage the gradient, and the engineering is remarkable.

The main line from Chiayi to Alishan is the principal journey, worth taking for the scenery alone. Within the Alishan resort area, three branch lines connect the main station to Chushan (sunrise platform), Zhaoping (forest trails), and the Shenmu (Sacred Tree) area. Train-within-a-train operations are unusual anywhere; here you step off the main line into a miniature branch-line network running through ancient cypress forest.

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A story
The railway was built by the Japanese colonial administration starting in 1899, originally to haul timber down from the mountain. The engineers had to solve the problem of an extreme gradient using a series of switchbacks — the train reverses direction multiple times as it climbs — and the zigzag system they devised at Zhuqi (Dulishan) is still in use today, one of the few remaining examples of its kind in Asia.

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