Taipei Main Station Layover: Railway Park
Part of the full Taipei 101 and Longshan on a TPE Layover
Taipei Main Station stacks four rail systems into one building, and a restored 1918 railway headquarters, a black-and-white lobby floor people sit down on, and 815 metres of covered shops running north are all inside a ten-minute walk of the concourse.
The 1918 railway headquarters on Yanping North Road
Brick below and timber above, the old Railway Department office went up as the head office of Taiwan’s railways under Japanese rule, and the ground it sits on held a Qing-dynasty machinery bureau before that, whose stone wall footings turned up during metro construction and are left exposed in the grounds. Restoration ran fifteen years; it opened as a museum in 2020. Admission is NT$100 at the door, 09:30 to 17:00 with the last tickets at half past four, and it shuts on Mondays. If you are also going to the neoclassical main museum in the park south of the station, the four-site combined ticket covers both and works out cheaper than paying twice.
Eight heritage structures stand in the grounds, and two are worth going out of your way for. One is a men’s lavatory built in 1919 as an octagon: urinals ranged around a central column, eight concrete beams fanning out overhead like an opened umbrella, the whole shape chosen to move air through it. The other is the war command centre of 1943, a reinforced concrete air-raid shelter dug in behind the offices. Inside the main hall, the piece people stay longest at is a 1:80 model of Taipei Station and its streets as they stood in the 1970s and 1980s, before the tracks were buried, with trains running across it on the hour.
The chequerboard floor in Taipei Main Station’s great hall
In May 2020 the railway administration stopped people sitting down in the great hall, as a pandemic measure. Sit-in protests followed, the ban was dropped that July, and multilingual smiley-face decals went down on the tiles instead. What everyone was arguing over is a black-and-white chequerboard filling the atrium of the 1989 station building, with ticket windows along one side and four levels of walkway looking down on it.
On Sundays it fills up. The hall is where Taipei’s Indonesian and Filipino communities meet on their day off, and the shops in the arcades around the station reflect that the rest of the week too. Midweek the same floor is mostly people waiting for trains.
Four rail systems feed this one building, and the corridors between them are narrow, sloped and busy at every peak; a wheeled suitcase in the transfer crush between the high-speed platforms and the metro is the slowest thing in it.
The book street under Zhongshan Road
Two underground malls run out of the station in opposite directions, and between them they cover more than 1.6 kilometres without a step outside. The Zhongshan Metro Mall goes 815 metres north to Shuanglian across nearly 15,000 square metres, with five open squares and seven exits along it, and the stretch between Zhongshan and Shuanglian stations is given over to bookshops. Going the other way, the Taipei City Mall runs 825 metres with 28 entrances, fourteen on each side.
Neither is a sight in the usual sense. What they are is a way to spend forty minutes in a typhoon-season downpour without getting wet, with somewhere to eat every fifty metres, and a way to reach the Zhongshan area without surfacing at all.
The airport line does not share Taipei Main Station’s platforms
A 115-metre underground walkway runs west out of the main railway concourse to reach them, about 250 metres end to end, which is five to ten minutes on foot that no timetable accounts for. The purple express leaves every 15 minutes for Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport, about 35 minutes to Terminal 1 and 38 to Terminal 2 for NT$160, and the last one goes at 23:15. The basement level of the same building has in-town check-in desks for four airlines, open until half past nine at night and closing three hours before each departure.
Two or three hours here is a museum and a covered walk; if the gap is long enough to justify crossing the city, the wider Taipei itinerary picks up Xinyi and the old temples, and either way the suitcase is better left at a storage point near the station than wheeled through the transfer corridors twice.
Frequently asked questions
What should I do during a layover near Taipei Main Station in Taipei?
With two hours, the Railway Department Park is the one thing here worth a ticket: NT$100, a five-minute walk from the concourse, and a set of Japanese-era railway buildings including an octagonal men's washroom from 1919. With one hour, the station's own great hall and the chequerboard floor people sit on are free and take ten minutes to look at, and the underground mall running north from it gives you 815 metres of shops without surfacing. The museum is the piece to drop if the connection is tight, since it needs a good hour inside and it closes at five.
Is anything near Taipei Main Station open on a Monday?
The Railway Department Park is not; like the rest of the National Taiwan Museum it takes Monday as its closing day, so a Monday layover loses the ticketed stop. Everything else here runs regardless. The station's great hall and the underground malls on both sides of it keep ordinary retail hours seven days a week, and Beimen, the 1884 city gate a few minutes west, stands on an open traffic island with nothing to close.
Where exactly do I catch the airport train at Taipei Main Station?
Not from the platforms the trains and the metro use. The Airport MRT has its own station about 250 metres west of the main railway concourse, linked to it by a 115-metre underground walkway, so allow five to ten minutes on foot on top of whatever the timetable says. From there the purple express runs every 15 minutes and takes about 35 minutes to Terminal 1 and 38 to Terminal 2 at Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport, NT$160 either way, with the last express at 23:15. Four airlines will also take your checked bag on the basement level of the same building, up to three hours before departure and no later than 21:30.
Can I do any of this without going outside?
Most of it. The Zhongshan Metro Mall runs 815 metres north from underneath the station to Shuanglian, and the Taipei City Mall runs 825 metres the other way with 28 entrances along it, so a wet afternoon can be spent almost entirely below street level, and both connect straight into the station concourse. The Railway Department Park is the exception: it is a five-minute walk above ground on Yanping North Road, and the site is half outdoor courtyard, so it is the stop that a downpour actually spoils.