Early closures, late openings of NSEWL train stations to continue beyond June

SINGAPORE — The early closures and late opening of MRT stations along the North-South and East-West lines (NSEWL) will continue beyond June, rail operator SMRT and the Land Transport Authority (LTA) said on Wednesday (March 7).

The move extends the authorities’ decision since last December to shorten the service hours on the two ageing lines for some weekends and select weekdays, in order to free up more time for maintenance and repair work on the tracks, stations and train depots.

This has also helped to speed up the installation and testing of the new signalling system along the East-West Line by six months, SMRT and LTA said, bringing forward the project’s completion date to June this year.

But they added that additional engineering hours were still needed beyond June to renew other critical aspects of the NSEWL system. LTA and SMRT gave no further details on the dates when train services would be affected.

Speaking in Parliament on Wednesday, Transport Minister Khaw Boon Wan said his ministry’s “top priority” was to correct the rail reliability problems which plagued the network last year.

He told the House during the Committee of Supply debate on his ministry’s budget that the rail network was making good progress on the issue, as measured by the Mean Kilometres Between Failures (MKBF) standard.

The MRT network has so far this year has exceeded the Transport Ministry’s targets of 600,000 train-km before hitting delays of more than five minutes said Mr Khaw, who added that a MKBF target of 1 million train-km has been set by 2020.

Mr Khaw, who is also Coordinating Minister for Infrastructure, said that his ministry was “determined to regain public confidence” in the MRT system, but cautioned that “until all the ageing assets are fully replaced and upgraded, we may still encounter some delays or disruptions”.