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Last week I took a three-day recording trip up north to capture high-speed rail trains and station ambience for my Taiwan train sound library. The highlight of the trip was the first day when I recorded the high speed rail train (bullet train) pass-by’s. Unfortunately it was quite a windy day!

This is NOT something you want to see when exiting the train station.

Non-refundable hotel bookings meant I had to push forward. The windy conditions became part of the journey rather than a barrier—a challenge I actually grew to appreciate for the story it would later tell.

I walked to a nearby scooter rental shop and rented this 180cc Kymco Racing King for $500nt. 

I was expecting it to be cold that day, but the wind made it oh so much colder. I’ll be honest, I loved it! It just doesn’t get cold enough in Kaohsiung for me. 🙂

I drove off to my first location. It was a bust. There were a bunch of bamboo trees next to the road. The wind was making them smack each other. So I drove on to the next spot. 

For reference, I marked six or seven possible locations on Google Maps before the trip.

The second location spared me some of the wind, but there was a house with a noisy dog some ways behind me. It seemed to quiet down as I sat there with the scooter off for a few minutes, but I didn’t want to chance it starting to bark again. I had a lot of daylight ahead of me, so I pushed on to the third location.

Now this was the spot that had potential! So I set up and waited.

I managed to get several useable pass-by’s despite the heavy-at-times wind. There was a highway a kilometer or so behind me, but the low frequency drone shouldn’t be difficult to remove from the recordings. 

I spent the rest of the day driving from place to place. Most didn’t work out, but I DID find one spot by accident while scrolling around on Google Maps that day.

There was this “road” that appeared to go right to the tracks. You can see the faint outline next to the little green and white circle flag thingy.

I knew there wouldn’t be a road there but it didn’t look like much of a bushwhacking trip to get near the tracks. So I marked it as a sort of “last resort”. And yes, I did need to go there. When I had arrived at my final pre-planned location, I still hadn’t any truly quiet recordings. It was either the wind, dogs barking, garbage truck music, traffic…any number of things that caused problems. So…I threw my hail-mary and pushed on to this final spot.

When I arrived it was dark. It looked something like this:

This picture was from 2019. Imagine seven years of growth. That’s what I had to contend with. But it wasn’t all that bad. Luckily I had the foresight to bring my headlamp along. Though it did worry me a bit. There were some houses nearby. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t illegal to go through there, but I had worried someone might see my light and come over to investigate (possibly ruining a recording). It was all worry for nothing though; nobody saw me or they didn’t care.

Along the way, I spotted this old truck hidden in the darkness. The rusted front end kinda looks like Optimus Prime—a little reminder that these locations have their own stories.

Not far from there I found a nice spot to set up. I don’t have any pictures, but I do have this video. 

I replaced the iPhone audio with an edited audio from my recording gear.

I really love the sound of those trains shooting past you at high speed!

The Rest of the Trip

The rest of the trip went well. I recorded a lot of train station, on-train, and platform ambience. In total I recorded Miaoli station, Taipei station, Qidu station, Hualien station, and Taitung station.

I didn’t take a lot of pictures. Here’s a couple…

Taipei Station

And Hualien Station from the outside

One final note. The entire trip, my wife was “following me”. Yes, you heard that right! Well, her VOICE was following me. 

 

I heard it at Taipei, Hualien, and Taitung stations. Kinda fun. 🙂

All in all, it was a solid trip. I walked away with some great HSR pass-by’s despite the wind; station ambience from five different locations; and yeah—my wife’s voice on the recordings. Not bad for three days of scooter riding, train travel and a little bushwhacking!