Taipei, March 3 (CNA) Three new stops will be added to Taiwan's high speed rail system at the end of this year, the head of the Bureau of High Speed Rail said Tuesday.

Allen Hu (胡湘麟), the bureau's director-general, said the three stops -- Miaoli, Changhua and Yunlin -- will open in early December, while a stop in Taipei's Nangang will be inaugurated in mid-2016.

Hu said the additions will increase the number of stops to 12 from the present eight.

The bureau said the minimum current travel time for a Taipei-Kaohsiung (Zuoying) train is 90 minutes. If the train stops at all stations, however the travel time is 120 minutes.

The bureau estimated that if three new stops are added, and a north-south train stops at all 11 stops, the travel time will be 138 minutes.

If the Nangang stop is also added and goes into operation in July 2016, the bureau estimated that a train traveling from Nangang to Zuoying, stopping at every stop, will take 150 minutes. Hu said the bureau has asked the Taiwan HIgh Speed Corp. to work out a schedule and ticket price adjustments in preparation for the additional stops.

He noted that daily passenger load was about 132,000 people per day in 2014, up 1.1 percent from the previous year.

The 345-km high speed rail system was inaugurated in January 2007. Its current eight stops are Taipei, Banqiao, Taoyuan, Hsinchu, Taichung, Chiayi, Tainan and Zuoying.

(By Wang Shu-fen and Lilian Wu)
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