THE RAILWAY
The Alishan Forest Railway: A Logging Line Turned Wonder
Switchbacks, a spiral loop and a 2,000-metre climb — the Japanese-built railway that is an attraction in its own right.
See Alishan tours on GetYourGuide ↗Built to haul cypress
The Alishan Forest Railway did not begin as a tourist attraction. Surveys started in 1900 and construction in 1906, under the Japanese colonial government, for a single purpose: to extract the mountain's magnificent red cypress and Taiwania timber. The first contractor, Fujita-gumi, gave up in 1908 defeated by the terrain; the government took over and pushed the main line up to Zhaoping by 1913. For half a century the railway hauled ancient trees down the mountain, until logging finally ended in 1963 and the line, and the forest, were left to become something else.
An engineering marvel
What makes the railway extraordinary is how it climbs. Over an 86-kilometre network it rises from around 30 metres to 2,451 metres on 762 mm narrow-gauge track, through more than fifty tunnels and seventy-odd wooden bridges, at gradients up to 6.26 percent. Where the slope defeats even a spiral, the train uses four Z-shaped switchbacks — pulling forward, stopping, then reversing up the next grade — plus a full spiral loop at Dulishan. It's one of only a handful of mountain railways in the world to combine narrow gauge, spirals and switchbacks, alongside legends like Darjeeling and Sri Lanka's hill lines, and it sits on Taiwan's UNESCO World Heritage tentative list.
Fifteen years, and a reopening
The railway's recent history has been hard. Typhoons repeatedly battered the main line, and after severe damage — including from Typhoon Morakot in 2009 — the full Chiayi–Alishan route was severed for fifteen years. Only with the completion of Tunnel 42 did the whole line finally reopen, on 6 July 2024. That makes riding the entire railway up the mountain a genuinely fresh possibility, and one many Taiwanese travellers had waited a long time for.
Riding it today
For visitors, the railway is both transport and attraction. You can ride the reopened main line between Chiayi and Alishan for a slow, spectacular climb, and on the mountain the short branch lines — the pre-dawn Zhushan sunrise train, and the Zhaoping and Shenmu lines to the trailheads — run daily. Riding at least one leg by rail, whether up from Chiayi or out to the giant trees, connects you to the whole strange, beautiful history of the place: a line built to cut down a forest that now carries people up to marvel at what remains of it.