Premier Su Tseng-chang attended an official ceremony held Tuesday at the Hualien railway station to celebrate the delivery of tilting trains fabricated by a Japanese company under contract to the Taiwan Railway Administration (TRA).

The new trains, named "Taroko," will be commissioned to run between Taipei and the eastern county of Hualien, which is separated by mountains from the economically-flourishing west.

The TRA revealed that the special trains can significantly reduce the time required to travel from the capital city to the east.

In his address, Su said railway transportation between the west and east is expected to undergo a significant change after the new trains, which will allow passengers in Taipei to travel to Hualien within two hours, begin operating in March as scheduled.

In the future, the eastern county, famous for scenic landscapes, is expected to flourish economically as the new infrastructure helps bring in more tourists, said Su, who rode the Taroko to Hualien for the ceremony, along with Hualien County Magistrate Hsieh Shen-shan, Minister of Transportation and Communications Tsai Duei and TRA Director-General Chen Yi-nan, and several lawmakers and Hualien county councilors.

The Executive Yuan agreed to the TRA purchase of tilting trains, also called free-go trains, in March 2003. Chen said compared with traditional trains, the tilting trains can run at a speed of 20-25 km per hour faster on curves.

As a traditional train rounds a curve at speed, passengers experience centrifugal force because their inherent momentum forward no longer lies along the line of the train's course. This normally causes packages to slide about on the floor and people seated to feel squashed against their neighbors or outboard armrest.

Tilting trains are designed to counteract such discomfort by tilting several degrees in the direction of the curve, thus compensating for the centrifugal force.