By failrail.sg
There seems to have been a persistent track fault delaying service between Joon Koon and Boon Lay today (1 Nov). SMRT updated on Facebook that there two delays – the first delay occurred around 3pm and was resolved an hour later. The second delay occurred around 8pm and SMRT said it will send its engineers to rectify the problem after the end of revenue service.
It is unknown whether the two incidents were related. Anyway, if the understanding is correct, although SMRT maintained that there was only 10 minutes’ delay to travelling time, the *duration* of both incidents lasted several hours in total.
So guess which number (10 mins or the several hours) get counted towards LTA’s System Service Availability (SSA) standard of 99.5% (at most 3 delay hours every month)?
LTA announced the recent round of fines for the train operators in October however there is a list of service disruptions that have contravened the Operating Performance Standards (OPS) but were not subject to regulatory action so far. The following cases were severe enough to warrant the activation of bus bridging services and the deployment of additional staff to affected stations:
- First, two faults on the NEL caused delays lasting almost the entire day on 17 August 2012 (number of commuters affected was not publicly reported for this incident). LTA believes this is a case of stress corrosion cracking but have not identified the source of the corrosive agent.
- Second, another case of stress corrosion cracking caused a NEL delay of nearly 7 hours affecting 58,000 commuters on 10 January 2013. Again, LTA has not identified the source of the corrosive agent.
- Third, a faulty train caused an hour’s delay on the NEL affecting 26,000 commuters on 20 December 2012.
- Fourth, a train fault that caused delays of more than 20 minutes on the EWL during evening peak hours on 24 August 2013.
- And finally, LTA has not announced any regulatory action for the service disruptions caused by the four rail crack incidents that occurred earlier this year (April/May 2013).
In Minister Lui’s parliamentary reply on 9 July 2013, he stated that there were a total of 32 major incidents, that exceeded 30 minutes of service disruption in the period between January 2010 and June 2013. Of these, 17 were on the North-South-East-West Line (NSEWL); nine on the Circle Line (CCL) and six on the North East Line (NEL). The majority of these incidents seems to have occurred in the years 2010 – 2011 because LTA Chief Executive Mr Chew Hock Yong said that there were only three incidents in 2012 that exceeded 30 minutes of service disruption, in a separate media update in May 2013.
However, the data shows otherwise. It is up for anyone’s guess on whether is the reason for the discrepancy between the SSA figures reported in Parliament versus the data presented on the failrail.sg site. (source)
