Lam was responding to an unprecedented two-day breakdown of services between Admiralty and Central stations on the Tsuen Wan MTR line after a train crash during a trial run for a new signalling system.

While MTR Corp bosses apologised to the public as the outage ended on Wednesday morning, Lam said the government could do more as the railway operator’s majority shareholder.

“Many public bodies will encounter problems over increasing work and calls for transparency,” Lam told lawmakers. “So the governing boards of these public bodies need to have the ability to reflect upon and review themselves. If it requires the government’s intervention to instil change, I am more than willing to do so.”

That warning came after rail chiefs apologised for the disruption, but stopped short of saying whether passengers would be compensated.

“To the affected passengers, we apologise,” the MTR Corp’s operations director, Adi Lau Tin-shing, said.

Lau gave no details on potential compensation for passengers, simply saying: “We will follow the existing mechanism.”

As part of the adjustment mechanism for MTR fares, the railway firm can be fined up to HK$25 million for service disruption. The fines may be redistributed to passengers as fare rebates.

Lau said the corporation had set up a panel to investigate the cause of the incident, and its report would be made public in two to three months.

Derailed train back on tracks as Hong Kong officials try to reassure public

Meanwhile, the railway firm’s outgoing chairman, Frederick Ma Si-hang, inspected Central station at around 8am on Wednesday.

Ma reiterated that Thales, the French supplier of the signalling system, would hand over a report on the crash on Friday.

“We can promise we will find the cause and safety is our top priority,” Ma said.

Services resumed after the rail operator announced the trains involved in the collision had been removed from the main tracks and repair work near Central station had been finished.

Lau said the critical moment in the operation came at 11pm on Tuesday, when the derailed carriage was put back on the track.

After moving the trains to sidetracks at Admiralty, workers found only minor damage to a signalling box and some overhead cables, which they fixed, Lau said.

They also did a test run under the Electrical and Mechanical Services Department’s observation.

“After passing the safety test, we were able to fully resume train services [on the Tsuen Wan line],” Lau said.

He said the trains would stay parked on the sidetracks, before being towed to a depot in Tsuen Wan, Kowloon Bay or Chai Wan for repairs.

A government source said the railway firm would be fined.

“There is going to be some financial penalty arising from this incident,” the source said. “But we are still discussing the exact amount and how to calculate it.”

In previous cases, the amount of the fine was calculated by the time of the most delayed train.

For example, the MTR Corp was fined HK$2 million for a train that was delayed by 83 minutes during an incident in August 2017 which caused trains on the Kwun Tong line to run slower than usual for more than 10 hours.

At the Legislative Council, transport minister Frank Chan Fan said the current mechanism to fine the railway firm for service disruption had not taken the possibility of a partial stoppage on a line into account.

“When the mechanism was set up, I believe this unique situation was not considered,” Chan said.

“We need to look into the seriousness of the incident and the appropriateness of the penalty.”