The main building dates from 1919, but the site's railway history reaches further back, to the late Qing dynasty, when the area near the North Gate was already being used for railway administration. The Qing had begun constructing Taiwan's first railway in the 1880s, and by the time Japan took control of the island in 1895, the infrastructure — rough and incomplete — was already in place to be taken over and expanded.

The 1919 building that stands today is a product of mature Japanese colonial ambition. It is a two-story brick structure with symmetrical massing, arched windows, and the kind of institutional confidence that colonial governments tended to invest in administrative buildings. The design reflects the architecture of the Meiji and Taisho eras, when Japanese builders on Taiwan were producing structures that balanced European classicism with local materials and climate. Beside the main headquarters, the Old Taipei Railway Workshop — located to the northwest — is also part of the historic site complex.

From 1919 to 1945, the building housed the Taihoku Railway Bureau and the Railway Department of the Governor-General's Bureau of Transportation. This was the era of Taiwan's most significant railway expansion. The Japanese colonial government extended lines to serve the sugar industry in the south, the timber industry in the mountains, and the military installations distributed across the island. Running all of it required an administrative apparatus, and this building was its home.

After Japan's surrender in 1945, the transfer of authority was bureaucratically efficient in at least one respect: Taiwan Railways Administration, the successor body under the Republic of China, moved into the same building and used it as headquarters until 1990. The institutional continuity — Japanese railway administrators replaced by Chinese Nationalist railway administrators, in the same rooms, at the same desks — is a quiet encapsulation of Taiwan's twentieth-century history.

A building unused for two decades deteriorates in ways that are sometimes invisible from the outside. The Railway Department complex was designated a national monument in 2007, which provided legal protection but not immediate resources. The National Taiwan Museum, which manages the site, began formal repair work on January 9, 2014, taking on a project that involved not only structural stabilization but the restoration of period details: the wooden staircases, the high-ceilinged administrative rooms, the courtyard relationships between buildings.

The work was initially completed in 2016, but the full public opening waited until July 7, 2020 — a date that landed in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, which meant that the building's debut was quieter than the occasion warranted. Those who did visit encountered a restoration that had taken pains to present the building as it was, rather than as an idealized version of what it might have been. The bones of colonial administration — the clerk's windows, the record-keeping rooms, the railway operations center — were legible again.

The Railway Department building is now administered as part of the National Taiwan Museum, which makes it one node in a broader network of historical sites in central Taipei. The proximity to the North Gate — itself one of the few surviving elements of the original Qing city wall, preserved almost by accident when colonial planners failed to demolish it — gives the area a particular density of historical reference. Within a short walk, you can move from Qing-era city infrastructure to Japanese colonial administration to the Taipei of the mid-twentieth century.

The museum's programming at the Railway Department site has focused on Taiwan's railway history, from the Qing-era origins through Japanese expansion to the postwar national railway system. For visitors interested in how an island was organized and moved, this building is an unusually direct window — not just into administrative architecture, but into the logistics of colonial governance and the infrastructure that outlasted it.