Govt likely to reveal cause of CCL signal issue ‘within this week’

SINGAPORE — Within this week, the Government is expected to make known the cause of the signalling interference that has repeatedly tripped up train services on the Circle Line (CCL) in recent months, Transport Minister Khaw Boon Wan said in Parliament yesterday, while addressing parliamentarians’ concerns about rail reliability. 

He also said that rail reliability is improving, with trains now travelling about 158,000 train-km — the distance travelled between delays of more than five minutes — which is better than last year’s 133,000 train-km, but well short of the target of 400,000 train-km by 2018.

Responding to Non-Constituency Member of Parliament Dennis Tan who asked for updates on the investigations, Mr Khaw said the signal problem is a “very interesting incident” that has challenged his team for several weeks. 

While the cause was clear — that there was a particular signal interfering with the trains’ wireless signalling system — tracking it down required a lot of “effort” because they needed to eliminate the various possibilities one by one to establish the cause, he said.

“We’re very close to it now, and I’m fairly confident that, within this week, we will be able to go public on what exactly was the cause and how we have been able to fix it,” he added.

Last Friday, the authorities took the unprecedented step of ordering a full-day suspension of mobile services through all 30 stations on the line.

On the matter of reliability, Mr Khaw, who is also Coordinating Minister for Infrastructure, admitted that Singapore is still quite “far off” compared with Hong Kong MTR’s performance of 360,000 train-km and Taipei Metro’s 800,000 train-km. 

The target for Singapore is to hit 800,000 train-km by 2020, and comprehensive plans are already in place to reach “higher standards”, he said.

The LTA also published fresh figures on the rail service performance of various lines on its website yesterday. In the first half of the year, there were 10 MRT train delays of more than 30 minutes, compared with 15 for the whole of last year. Four of these took place on the East-West Line, three on the North-South Line, two on the Circle Line, and one on the North-East Line. 

In addition, there were eight service delays of more than 30 minutes on the LRT network — five of them on the Sengkang-Punggol network — compared with 15 for the whole of last year.