Due to the lack of maintenance capabilities, Singapore’s North-South and East-West lines were incapacitated for over 7 hours during the peak hour morning today (July 25) by two separate faults. According to official responses, trains were seeing severe delays from an intermittent power fault at 7.26am,. However, the delays started as early as 6am where trains were delayed for more than ten minutes according to commuters. The delayed broadcast caused serious overcrowding with queues stretching from the platform to outside the station at Lakeside station.
SMRT then reported a separate “circuit fault” at 8.51am at Commonwealth station, and published fake news claiming the delay was only 15 mins (revised to 20 mins and later to 25 mins) when the delay was more than 2 hours.
At 11.30am, SMRT then reported that it shut down 8 train stations between Queenstown and Bugis for 30 minutes to conduct “urgent repair works”. The Land Transport Authority (LTA) reported that the power fault was a result of a loosened service maintenance door at Tiong Bahru station.
The cumulated delays caused an estimated least of 1 million workers to be at least an hour late for work – costing an estimated least of $30 million in economic losses.
This is also the second consecutive day of train breakdowns, but the delay for yesterday was covered up by SMRT.
Singapore’s two Transport Ministers and two CEOs of SMRT are avoiding the media and unavailable for comments on the slew of train breakdowns. Three of the four million-dollar paycheck leaders – Minister Ng Chee Meng, CEO Desmond Kuek, CEO Lee Ling Wee – are former army generals who have zero experience managing public transport, ministry or a private organisation. They were appointed based off cronyism and corruption links with ruling party dictator Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong. Minister Khaw Boon Wan is retiring in 2020 and could not be bothered with handling the train breakdown issues.