The Kowloon-Canton Railway Corporation yesterday expressed confidence that its Hung Hom station will be able to cope with vastly increased traffic when it becomes the terminal for several railway networks.
The station will become the meeting point for all southbound lines when the Kowloon Southern Link is completed in 2009. When the Sha Tin-Central link is finally built, the station will become the meeting point for at least three networks.
A KCRC spokeswoman said the station would be able to cope with the extra load. She did not give a figure but a document submitted to the government in 2003 projected an extra 190,000 passengers a day by 2016. The 3.8km Southern Link will complete the network from the West Rail terminus in Tuen Mun to Lo Wu.
To cope with the extra West Rail trains, the KCRC launched a HK$130 million project last April to realign rail tracks for better train deployment. Two of the four tracks on platforms 2 and 3 will be dedicated to the southbound and northbound traffic for West Rail, while East Rail will keep the remaining two tracks. A spokeswoman said the arrangement would allow direct transfer for passengers switching from East Rail to West Rail.
KCRC civil projects engineer Frankie Ng Sze-ho admitted leaving just two tracks for East Rail trains would push handling capacity to the limit, but it would allow the cross-switching of tracks between East Rail and West Rail if the need arose.
When work on the tracks, due to be finished by the end of the year, is completed, the station's maximum capacity will increase from 22 trains an hour in each direction to 27.
