Thursday, January 10, 2013

North-East Line breakdown on January 10 2013


North East MRT Line (NEL) service between HarbourFront and Dhoby Ghaut Stations went down today for half a day due to a power fault. According to SBS Transit, operator of the line, the fault happened at 9.51am which earlier caused a delay on the line and engineers traced the fault to wires in the Overhead Catenary System in a section of the tunnel between Outram Park and Harbourfront. And to enable repair works to be conducted, train services were disrupted at 10.14 am.

SBS Transit later announced that they are aiming to restore full service to the North-East Line by 4.30 pm before the start of evening peak:

We first experienced a power fault at 9.51am and this caused a delay of about 15 minutes.

We were able to narrow down the fault to a stretch between Harbourfront and Outram Park stations at about 10.14am and a decision was made to disrupt services between Harbourfront and Dhoby Ghaut stations so that our engineers could enter the tunnel to repair the stainless steel U-shaped bolt holding the cantilever arm of the overhead power cables. These bolts had recently been checked following the service delay in August 2012 and were found to be in good working condition.

Free bus shuttle services were activated and Goodwill Ambassadors dispatched to assist with crowd control and enquiries.

We currently have about 30 engineers on the ground working on repairs. We hope to have full service resumption by 4.30pm, before the start of evening peak.

We would like to apologise to all commuters affected by this disruption.


According to Channel News Asia, NEL services fully resumed at 4:35 pm although there was not any update on SBS Transit web site:


SBS Transit said all train services on the North East Line (NEL) fully resumed at 4:35pm, following a disruption on Thursday morning due to a power fault.


The North East MRT Line (NEL), a.k.a purple line, is the third Mass Rapid Transit line in Singapore and is operated by SBS Transit (ComfortDelGro Corporation). The line has seen 3 distruptions in 2012. On March 15th 2012, a peak hour train breakdown occured between Dhoby Ghaut and HarbourFront MRT stations caused by faulty overhead power cables at the tunnel of the Outram Park station. On 17 August 2012, a power supply fault and a subsequent signalling fault led to a delay in train services by an average of 20 minutes in both directions. And on 20 December 2012, train services on the North East Line between Punggol and Little India delayed due to a train fault.



Meanwhile, The Land Transport Authority (LTA) has announced that it intends to peg the maximum penalty for each train disruption to a percentage of operators' annual fare revenue from the affected MRT line.

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