Secret report on LRT crash calls for safety moves

SAFETY on Tuen Mun's accident-plagued Light Rail Transit should be improved, a secret government report into this month's fatal train crash has recommended.

But last night the Transport Branch refused to release any of the report's findings or reveal what safety improvements should be made.

Legislators said the 320,000 people who used the system every day had a right to know, and called for the report's recommendations to be published in full.

Two people died and more than 40 were injured when a coach carrying factory workers was sandwiched between two light rail trains at a junction near Fu Tei on September 11. The coach driver and a coach passenger were killed.

The accident was the worst in the LRT's history. Just six weeks before an LRT driver was killed when his train was in collision with a truck, the first railway employee to be killed on the system.

The chairman of the Legislative Council's Transport Panel Miriam Lau Kin-yee said the Government had a duty to tell people what was going on.

'They might have some reservations about releasing the entire report, but what they are proposing to do should be in the public domain.' New Territories West elected legislator Tang Siu-tong, also a Transport Panel member, said: 'Unless there is something really commercially confidential in the report, we should see it.' But a Transport Branch spokesman said the report remained confidential.