A Touch of Green | Taian Old Station — A Platform With Nothing Scheduled

Taian is a station with no trains. The line was realigned in 1998, the new station opened elsewhere, and this one was left with its platform, its tracks and its ticket window intact and nothing scheduled.

That is the condition A Touch of Green needed. The Taichung city government lists Taian among the drama's locations, alongside Guangfu New Village and the Houli ranch, and a period series set across four decades of departures needs a platform that no modern train will roll into mid-take.

The building is a survivor of a disaster. The great earthquake of 1935 wrecked the railway through central Taiwan, and the reconstruction that followed produced the station standing here now — plain reinforced concrete, a shallow portico on square columns, pale render and green window frames, built to a 1930s official template and built to stay up. A memorial to the earthquake reconstruction of the Taichung line stands nearby.

The layout is the thing to notice. The platform sits well above the station building, so you climb to reach the track and the rails run off into the hills on an embankment. Standing on that platform, the drama's logic is obvious: a woman on the steps, a man on the train, and a curve that takes him out of sight in about four seconds.

Open daily through the afternoon, free, part of a small railway park. It is roughly fifteen to twenty minutes on foot from the working Taian station, which catches people out. There are cherry trees here, and in season the site is busy.

Go up onto the platform and look north along the rails. Everything the series is about happens in that sightline, and the reason it still works is that nothing has come down it in nearly thirty years.

Cover photo: SElefant, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.