The Land Transport Authority (LTA) today (Feb 9) announced that they will be spending S$500 million to build a new power supply system for the North-South and East-West Lines. The two 30-year-old train lines were not designed to accommodate a 5 million Singapore population, and hence in recent years power-related faults have been surfacing.
LTA said that the new power supply system will be supplied and installed by Meiden Singapore, a subsidiary of listed Japanese engineering corporation Meidensha:
“The North-South and East-West lines (NSEWL) will get a new power supply system that will “significantly reduce” the number of power-related faults. Two contracts worth S$500 million have been awarded to Meiden Singapore. Work will begin this year and it is scheduled for completion in the early 2020s.”
The new Japanese electrical system will also feature an uninterrupted power supply function and automatic by-pass part of the circuit where a power fault occurred. There will also be real-time monitoring and a troubleshooting feature that auto detects faults.
A further S$73 million was also spent on to replace the track circuit system of the two MRT lines. The contract was awarded to a consortium by German engineering company Siemens and French engineering company Engie, who proposed a new system that can locate every train real-time.
Under a corrupted deal with SMRT in 2016, the Singapore government bought over all ageing assets of the railway system at S$1.2 billion. SMRT would have ran into bankruptcy if they were made to pay for the costly infrastructure upgrades costing billions.