The Five-Tenths Train

The starting terminus of the Luodong Forest Railway is tucked inside today's Luodong Forestry Culture Park. The tracks, a locomotive, the washing platform, the log pond, the log-unloading dock, even the old staff dormitories are all preserved intact — a forest-railway site you can walk right into.

In the early years, the dividing point between hauling timber and hauling sugarcane. After 1945 the station was torn down and the site turned to farmland, while the old railway became Ren'ai Road; the Waiziwai Bridge over the Luodong River was swapped from a raised hinoki-cypress trestle for one of concrete. In the Kavalan language, 'Waiziwai' means 'rattan.' By legend, the people of the Waiziwai (Kavalan) community put to sea in boats all woven from rattan. The place was also known as 'Fanshetou,' an old name meaning an Indigenous settlement; as Han settlers moved in to cultivate the land, most of the community moved away, and so the place came to be called 'Waiziwai.'

Under contract with the sugar mill, the Dazhou area once grew the densest sugarcane of all. The whistle sounding across the cane fields as the train rolled slowly by is a memory shared by the older generation of Dazhou.

Renamed 'Wanfu' Station after the war, its building rebuilt several times over, it still keeps a track-gang house and staff dormitories nearby. The place name 'Erwanwu' — literally 'twenty-five thousand' — is said to come from the roughly twenty-five thousand catties of sugarcane that one jiǎ of farmland could yield in those days.

Once the busiest station in Sanxing Township, where people from the nearby villages would take the train in to buy their daily goods. The building has been demolished; its site is now Sanxing Park and a seniors' activity centre, keeping a few lengths of track as a memento, while the original alignment has been widened into Yi-44 Road.

The best-preserved station on the whole line: the track bed, the track-gang house, the water tower where steam engines took on water, and the locomotive turntable all remain, and together with the surrounding village buildings they make Tiansongpi a place rich in both history and everyday life.

Later renamed 'Qingshuihu' Station; its residents were mostly power-plant workers and Taipingshan loggers. When the logging ended and the plant was automated, people moved away in great numbers and the station fell into disuse. The nearby Yuanshan unit of the Lanyang Power Plant is a run-of-river station drawing on the Lanyang River, now operated by remote control from the Tianpi control room.

Set in the narrow gap where the Xueshan and Central mountain ranges meet, the slopes on either side lock together like two bulls' horns — hence the name 'Niudou,' bulls locking horns. A mountain-entry checkpoint once stood here, and because the trains lingered a while, peddlers with bamboo baskets would gather to hawk their wares.

In Datong Township, originally Zhuoshui Village, renamed 'Leshui' after the war (and for a time called 'Malun'). Its convenient location once made it the most prosperous community here, with a Shinto shrine, a clinic, and a school, and loggers gathered from all over, giving it a remarkably mixed population. After the forest railway closed and the administrative centre moved away, it declined into what people call 'the forgotten village' — a settlement once divided into three parts: Chinau, Varloon (Malun), and Dorei.

'Tuchang' means a place where timber gathers — in the forestry vocabulary of the Japanese colonial era, any point where logs were collected and unloaded was a tuchang, and this one is the very start of the forest railway's lowland line. It was the transfer point between the mountain line and the lowland line, and the terminus at the far end of the Luodong Forest Railway: the hinoki cypress floated down from Taipingshan changed here onto the forest railway and set off, hugging mountain and river, toward Zhulin. On the site today stand a rebuilt Tuchang Station and a forest-railway history exhibit, right beside the entrance to the Taipingshan National Forest Recreation Area.