Kaohsiung Port Station, Hamasen Railway Museum, and the Pier 2 Art Center (高雄港車站 + 駁二藝術特區)

Mural at Pier 2

Over the past couple of decades Kaohsiung has tried to revitalize parts of it's industrial waterfront and move port facilities further from busy urban areas.

The Harbor Station

The new light railway

Kaohsiung used to have an extensive freight railway that circled the harbor until the early 2000's. The old trackbed is now being used in part by the new light railway. The Port Station was built in the Japanese era and served the historic Hamasen area.

Someone was exercising their parrot in the siding area

It closed along with the rest of the railway here as passenger and freight volumes declined. The station is now a small history museum and the old sidings are parkland. A few vintage train engines and carriages are parked around along with some metal sculptures.

Outside the Hamasen Railway Museum

In a cluster of warehouses on the far side of the sidings is the Hamasen Railway Museum. The exhibitions here focus on railway development in Taiwan. Most impressive is the huge model railway based on the entire Taiwan rail system.

Model of the old Taipei Station

Taichung

This fills pretty much an entire warehouse and has tons of cool details. A lot of historic parts of the railway system have been recreated and each little branch line is represented. Outside a sit-on train is popular with families and there are rotating exhibits in the other warehouses.

Pier 2

Railway mural on an abandoned building

Nearby is the Pier 2 Art District. Here groups of re-purposed warehouses along the waterfront have been turned into galleries, theaters, and shops. The sites are enjoyable to wander around and have a lot of outdoor sculptures and murals. Most of the warehouses contain the same sort of shops and exhibitions you'd find at Huashan or other re-purposed industrial sites like that in Taiwan. It’s mostly high end design and artisanal stuff. There are a couple of groups of warehouses with the Dayi ones furthest east being the largest group. Most of the warehouses in the area are from the 1970’s. Not a lot of the waterfront survived bombing during World War 2.

One of the Dayi Warehouses

A couple of other sites nearby include the grand entrance arch that marked the start of the restricted port area. Now with redevelopment the arch is a tourist landmark. Next to it is a quite pretty Japanese era commercial building.

The Kaohsiung Presbyterian Church is nearby on the edge of the Yancheng urban area. It’s a pretty church built in 1923 and remodeled in 1931. I admit I thought it was a modern copy at first. It's popular locally thanks to nighttime illuminations.

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Strange new buildings on the waterfront