Over half of 106 new MRT trains added to North-South, East-West lines; fleet completion by 2026
SINGAPORE - More than half of the 106 latest seventh-generation MRT trains slated for the North-South and East-West lines (NSEWL) lines have entered service, two years after the first unit was deployed.
As at June 29, 61 Alstom Movia R151 trains have entered service, a spokesperson for the Land Transport Authority (LTA) told The Straits Times.
With three new trains being introduced monthly since October 2024, up from two per month in 2023, the train fleet renewal is expected to be complete by 2026.
The first
R151 trains entered service in June 2023.
The new trains replace the first-generation Kawasaki Heavy Industry (KHI) trains. In September 2024, the failure of a KHI train crippled service along a stretch of the East-West Line for six days, in one of the worst disruptions in Singapore's rail history.
Transport operator SMRT, which runs the line, was fined $3 million by the LTA.
The delay in new train delivery, stemming from the Covid-19 pandemic, was cited by SMRT as a reason for the KHI trains remaining in use and the operator extending the interval between overhauls beyond the manufacturer's requirement.
The LTA said that there are 16 KHI trains in service on the NSEWL.
By September, these trains will be phased out, according to a post by SMRT on its Facebook page on June 23.
Designed in Germany, the new R151 trains are assembled in Changchun, China.
They have built-in condition monitoring capabilities and diagnostic systems that can pick up faults early and track the performance of various systems in real time.
The cars have bigger open spaces to increase passenger capacity while maintaining the number of seats. Other upgrades on board include wider windows and perch seats for passengers.
The first 66 of the 106 trains were ordered in 2018 at the cost of $1.2 billion to replace the first-generation KHI trains. Another 40 trains, costing $337.8 million, were bought in 2020 to replace now-retired second-generation Siemens and third-generation Kawasaki-Nippon Sharyo trains.
Alongside the KHI trains (introduced in 1987) and the R151, three other generations of trains, added between 2011 and 2018, are also operating on the NSEWL. These were manufactured by Kawasaki Heavy Industries and CSR Qingdao Sifang. They bring the NSEWL total fleet to 169 trains.
Work to renew the NSEWL started in 2012. Valued at $2.6 billion, the refurbishment included not only new trains but also a new signalling system that allows the trains to run at shorter intervals, upgraded power rails that supply electricity to the trains, and a track circuit system capable of detecting rail defects.
LTA said that the improvements have boosted the NSEWL's reliability, captured by the lines' Mean Kilometres Between Failure (MKBF), which is the reliability benchmark used for subways globally.
The authority added that since 2019, the NSEWL's MKBF has been over a million train-km between delays of more than five minutes, compared with 70,000 train-km for the North-South line and 60,000 train-km for the East-West line in 2012.
In LTA's latest rail reliability report, covering up to September 2024, the MKBF for the East-West MRT line, after accounting for the major service disruption, stood at 2.03 million train-km, down from 3.36 million train-km in 2023.
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