Taiwan Railway Bento
Type of ekiben, manufactured and distributed by the Taiwan Railway.
Taiwan Railway Bento (Chinese: 台鐵便當; pinyin: Táitiě Biàndāng) are a type of ekiben (bento boxed meals) manufactured and distributed on Taiwan Railway at major railway stations and in train cars. It is estimated that, with five million boxed meals sold each year, the annual revenue from bento distribution is 370 million NTD (approx. US$10 million).
History
During the Japanese era, train passengers either dined at a dining car or opted for an ekiben. However, ekiben boxes were only available at stations, not in train cars.
Under the Chinese Nationalists' rule from 1945 onwards, a variety of private catering services sprang up as railway transportation gained popularity. These services were then integrated by the Taiwan Railways Administration in 1960, gradually shaping the major source of revenues of the administration other than transport itself.
On 9 Jun 2000, the pork chop bento, which had been discontinued for 32 years, reappeared in public on the Railways Festival. The originally-estimated one thousand boxes to be sold turned out to be a sales of over 90 thousand due to their popularity.
On 26 Feb 2015, Keikyu Corporation, a Japanese rail operator, sold Taiwan Railway Mealboxes as a promotional event.
“Taiwan Railway Bento” enters the record as type of ekiben, manufactured and distributed by the Taiwan Railway. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Taiwan, Railway and Bento can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q15914808. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1945, 1960, 2000 and 2015.
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This entry incorporates text from “Taiwan Railway Bento” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.