If you take the North-East Line to work or school every morning, you’re most probably late to your destination today (27 February 2020).
And you most probably would have been in a very crowded area—something that the authorities are discouraging but this time it’s completely bo bian.
What you probably didn’t know is that the entire disruption lasted for a whopping 6 hours—and according to reports, everything was in a mess.
Here’s what happened.
North-East Line Was Disrupted for More Than 6 Hours This Morning & Confused People
The disruption started at 6am, whereby Punggol, Sengkang and Buangkok MRT stations were affected.
Unless you live in Mars, you’d know that these are one of the busiest stations in the line; Sengkang and Punggol even have their own LRT lines.
And I won’t need to tell you that this occurred during peak hours, which leads to images that’ll make everyone in MOH cry:
During the downtime, SBS Transit activated their shuttle buses, but that didn’t appear to help much: according to The Straits Times, there were just too many people, which increased people’s journey by about 40 minutes.
And at 10.40am, the entire line between Punggol and Hougang were shut down completely, which means six stations instead of three were affected.
The reason? They needed to fix the power fault that caused the entire disruption.
The line was only back in service at 12:22pm.
It’s been a while since we’ve had a major disruption, and that caused confusion among people due to the sudden increase in the number of stations affected.
Some people took the shuttle buses to Buangkok MRT Station, thinking that the disruption ended there but were shocked to be turned away from the station because that was closed as well.
It was chaos at the station as people had “struggled” to get into the shuttle bus…only to be told that they had to take another shuttle bus.
SBS Transit has apologised for the inconvenience.
Please be informed that NEL service has resumed at affected stations. With this, NEL is back to normal operations and free regular & bridging bus services have ceased. We are very sorry for the inconvenience caused.
— SBS Transit (@SBSTransit_Ltd) February 27, 2020
$100 Million Spent to Improve Rail Reliability
It’s ironic that just early this morning, it’s reported that $100 million will be spent in five years to improve rail reliability.
The $100 million will be used to build simulation facilities, whereby operators can use them to simulate anything from a track fault to cyber-security threats against the line so that they’ll know what to do in an event of a disruption or, interestingly, in a cyber-attack that could break the entire transport system.
But on the bright side, all MRT lines now have an MKBF (mean kilometres between failure) of more than 1 million train-km—which means based on numbers, there are less disruptions nowadays.
That number, of course, didn’t include this morning’s disruption.
