I was one of the 127,000 commuters affected by the MRT breakdown on Thursday night. I arrived at City Hall station at about 7pm, after knocking off from my work at Raffles City Tower, and found a huge crowd assembling on the station platform. After waiting for more than seven minutes to take the northbound train home, I realised that the LCD display on the platform was stuck at “Train arriving in 4 minutes”. I decided to go up to station control to find out what was going on.
A small crowd had gathered around the station master, who told us that train service from Marina Bay to Orchard (later Braddell) had stopped and it was going to be “a long, long time” before service would be restored.
I discovered later from the news that I had missed—by mere minutes—being on one of the four trains that got stuck on the northbound train. I ended up taking a big detour to Jurong East station and then north to my home in Sembawang. It took me three times longer than normal to reach home.
My experience was a mere inconvenience. But for the 4,000 passengers who were stuck for over an hour in the four packed trains with no lights, air conditioning or proper ventilation, it must have been a thoroughly traumatic experience. A photo circulating the Internet of a smashed train door window—an attempt by commuters to get some air to breathe—paints a vivid picture of how serious this train breakdown was. At least two commuters were hospitalised because of this incident.
While we only hear of train breakdowns in the news when there are massive disruptions like this, regular commuters will attest that there are many more “track faults” and slowdowns than are reported in the news.
In the 10 years that I have been taking trains daily along the North-South line to work, I have never experienced such poor quality of service as I do nowadays. Apart from massively overcrowded trains, every few days I would find myself in a stalled train in between stations, with a pre-recorded announcement repeating over and over again in the four official languages: “This train will be delayed because of a track fault. We are working on restoring the service soon. We apologise for the inconvenience caused.”
Oftentimes, the air conditioning is not working properly, and the vents are blowing out warm air onto a crowd of commuters packed like sardines. I have lost count of how many times I have written to SMRT to inform them of a broken down air conditioner.
I was one of the 127,000 commuters affected by the MRT breakdown on the night of 15 December 2011. I arrived at City Hall station at about 7pm, after knocking off from my work at Raffles City Tower, and found a huge crowd assembling on the station platform. After waiting for more than seven minutes to take the northbound train home, I decided to go up to station control to find out what was going on.
The station master told me that train service from Marina Bay to Braddell had stopped and it was going to be “a long, long time” before service would be restored. I discovered later from the news that I had missed—by mere minutes—getting on one of the four trains that got stuck on the northbound train. I ended up taking a big detour to Jurong East station and then north to my home in the north. It took me almost three times longer than normal to reach home.
My experience was a mere inconvenience. But for the 4,000 passengers who were stuck for over an hour in the four packed trains with no lights, air conditioning or proper ventilation, it must have been a thoroughly traumatic experience. At least two commuters were hospitalised because of this incident. One passenger had to break the train window just to get in some ventilation.
While we only hear of train breakdowns in the news when there are massive disruptions like this, regular commuters like myself will attest that there are many more “track faults” and slowdowns than are reported in the news.
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