SMRT Failures – Three Times in as Many Days

For my London and UK friends, this might feel like Déjà vu, but for us in Singapore there are usually very rare incidents, but in 3 days in a week – it is also becoming like a pattern here in Singapore too now! The most recent being today!

Although I was unaffected by the first outage on the Yellow Circle Line, apparently about 1,400 Circle Line commuters were affected by delays in train services due to a communication network problem during the peak hour on Wednesday morning. I was on the second one, but luckily not as bad as some commuters.

SMRT Evening Rush-Hour Disruption - North-South Line (Thurs 15th Dec)

SMRT Evening Rush-Hour Disruption - North-South Line (Thurs 15th Dec)

But the one experienced on Thursday did impact me! In the evening rush hour on Thursday this week, an estimated 127,000 commuters were affected by the breakdown that saw parts of the Red North-South line closed during the peak-hour traffic due to a fault on a power rail – about 40 metres of the rail was damaged.

Several trains were stuck in tunnels, and with air conditioning being shut down due to the lack of power, the ventilation must have been very poor down there. I am just lucky that I didn’t get trapped inside a train at the time of the power failure – yikes!

SMRT Saturday Morning Disruption - North-South Line (Sat 17th Dec)

SMRT Saturday Morning Disruption - North-South Line (Sat 17th Dec)

I only got news of this when we finished our hot-desk Thursday Korean dinner and we tried to go home from Tanjong Pagar MRT (Green East-West line) only to get as far on the Outram Park MRT.

I then decided to go to Dhoby Ghaut MRT from the operational Purple North-East line and then decided to walk up along Orchard Road to my apartment. Luckily it wasn’t raining, but there was tons of people around and the roads were very congested!

And today, after waking up, I heard news of yet another issue, this time down from Orchard MRT station – oh dear, heads will definitely roll very soon due to these failings!

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