Exclusive | Completion of Hong Kong’s Sha Tin to Central link ‘to be pushed back yet again, as MTR Corp cannot make up for past delays’
- A source says signalling glitches last year are to blame for the rail project missing its projected completion date of the first quarter of 2022
- The MTR Corporation hopes ‘to make sure this will be the final revision’ to the project’s completion date, the source says.
According to a source, the rail giant was still determining the ultimate length of the delay to the cross-harbour Hung Hom-Admiralty section of the HK$90.7 billion (US$11.7 billion) rail link, adding that the final completion date was still unknown.
“Due to the signalling system glitches for the connecting East Rail line last year, this project has been delayed by five months. It would be impossible to complete the section by the scheduled first quarter of next year, no matter how hard the MTR has tried,” the insider said.
“The question now is when the project can be completed after repeated delays. Everybody, including the government, hopes that the MTR Corp can get it done by the second quarter.”
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The source added the rail giant hoped “to make sure this will be the final revision [to the completion date] before announcing it to the public”.
Despite being repeatedly pressed by lawmakers and the press, the MTR Corp had been evasive about whether it would complete the Hung Hom-Admiralty section on time.
On Thursday, CEO Jacob Kam Chak-pui would only say that the section was 94 per cent complete, and that the company had been working hard to make up for the five months of delays caused by the signalling system problems. He also promised to update the public on any changes to the schedule after a review of the situation.
“However, we have not given up. We continue to work very hard to try to catch up as much time as we can,” Kam said.
The glitches led to the eleventh-hour cancellation of the launch of a new signalling system for the East Rail line last September over possible route-setting problems.
The original plan had been to roll out shorter trains on the line – made up of nine carriages rather than the current 12 – in conjunction with the new signalling system to ensure the line conformed to platform designs for the Sha Tin-Central link.
The signalling system upgrade restarted in February after an MTR Corp investigation found that staff had made an error of judgment in failing to push contractors to fully look into the causes of the problems.
The Tai Wai-Hung Hom section of the link – part of what is now the Tuen Ma Line connecting Wu Kai Sha to Tuen Mun – was opened at the end of June after repeated delays due to construction problems at Hung Hom station, where shoddy work was revealed by a whistle-blower.
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The opening of the cross-harbour section between Hung Hom and Admiralty has also been pushed back several times.
Quentin Cheng Hin-kei, spokesman for the Public Transport Research Team, a commuter concern group, said the public was accustomed to being disappointed by project delays at this point.
“We’ve got used to this kind of project delays by the MTR, and any further delays won’t be a surprise for us,” he said.
“The most important thing is to ensure the rail link’s safety and reliability before it is launched for operation. There is no need for the MTR Corp to rush things through just for the sake of meeting the government’s expectations.”
