Minister for Transport Khaw Boon Wan in his comment on the repeated fault of the Circle Line during the past two months, said that the fault incident is very interesting.
He said, “My team has been working on the line for several weeks. They have been challenged by it and we find great excitement in this very challenging incident.”
He stated that the cause is clear that there was signal interference.
Mr Khaw also said that tracking down the cause of the interference requires a lot of effort and that it is very intellectually challenging because there are many possibilities.
He noted that since his team needs to eliminate the possibilities one by one to try to establish what exactly is the cause.
“We are very close to it now and I’m very confident that within this week we’ll be able to go public on what the cause and how we are able to fix it,” he added.
Singapore Mass Rapid Transit (SMRT ) and Land Transport Authority (LTA) announced earlier on 2 November that their preliminary investigations into the major service disruption on the Circle Line (CCL) on that same day could be similar to that of the incidents in September this year and said that temporary telecommunication signal suspensions to be carried out to assist in investigations.
Intermittent loss of signalling-related communications was experienced on 2 November morning, leading to multiple delays of train services at various locations within the network. Two months earlier, the network was also disrupted, but for five days in a row from 29 Aug to 2 September.
LTA and SMRT had arranged with the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) and mobile network operators to suspend telecommunication signals along stretches of CCL for short periods of time to assist in investigations, should similar signalling faults recur. They said that if temporary telecommunication signal suspensions have to be carried out, there would be in-train and station announcements along the affected stretches.
