臺鹽七股機車庫

Qigu Saltworks Railway Workshop

September 4th, 2024

Completed in 1955, this second-generation workshop replaced an earlier facility from around 1942 and provided a maintenance area for the 762 mm gauge salt railway of the Qigu Saltworks. The salt railway dates to the Japanese colonial era, when it was used to consolidate salt production from outlying fields. After the war, the system was modernized with USAID into a network of trunk lines reaching deeper into the salt fields, extending to some 29.5 kilometres at its peak. Locomotives had hauled salt along these lines from the beginning, while hand-pushed trolleys handled only the final leg from the crystallization pans to the collection piles; a change in working method in 1971 let locomotives and trucks gather salt directly from the fields, retiring the trolleys. Rail operations ceased altogether in 1989 when the saltworks mechanized its salt flats. The workshop has been idle ever since, slowly becoming lost in the long grass south of the main saltworks administrative area.

The workshop is a composite of three adjoining single-storey brick buildings with double-pitched roofs, arranged east to west: the locomotive shed, a garage for large track-inspection cars, and a carpentry training workshop. The stepped gables of the locomotive shed, descending in tiers from a central ridge and edged with washed-terrazzo mouldings, are its most distinctive feature; two tracks run the length of the interior and out to the south, with maintenance pits set between the rails. The characters reading “locomotive shed” (機車庫) on the south gable were written by Zhu Jiuying (朱玖瑩), then director of the Salt Affairs Administration (鹽務總局). As the only surviving railway building associated with Taiyen (臺鹽), the state-owned salt enterprise, it was recognized for its heritage value in 2005, but still awaits restoration and renewal.

Warning: this location is abandoned, hazardous, or otherwise neglected and may be unsafe and even dangerous! Exercise appropriate precautions when visiting.

警告：此處已廢棄或長期無人管理，可能存在潛在危險。造訪時請務必提高警覺，並做好相關安全防護措施。