MTR on track for paperless future as engineers move to tablet PCs

The automated set-up lets inspectors update data anywhere along railway routes and has helped speed the process of structural examinations

In a bid to strengthen its asset-management operations, MTR Corp has quietly moved to automate structural inspection with the use of tablet personal computers.

First deployed in 2003, the Microsoft-based Fujitsu tablet PCs have eliminated the tedious business of carrying blueprints, maps and other paper data by the rail operator's seven-man inspection team.

Engineer Dorian Leung Wai-man, MTR maintenance support manager, said the inspections were carried out annually, covering the railway network's 87.7km route.

'Our inspectors do their job during the non-traffic hours, between 1 o'clock and 5 o'clock in the morning,' she said, noting that the tablet PCs had helped to speed up the inspection process during those hours.

The MTR, established in 1979, runs a 19-hour daily passenger service that handles about 2.4 million passengers a day. The service timetable is planned according to passenger demand, taking into account the morning and evening peaks on normal working days.

Harry Leung Hon-wa, systems analyst at the MTR, said the inspection programmes used on the tablet PCs were developed by in-house developers using standards-based software. Data gathered by inspectors is downloaded and studied at the MTR operations headquarters in Kowloon Bay.