It’s been a day since RapidKL announced a weeklong closure of 16 stations on the LRT Kelana Jaya Line, and it still seems outrageous. But while this is almost certainly the most severe outage ever to hit the line, alarmingly, it’s not an isolated incident—it’s just the latest in a long line of problems, stretching back years. In fact, it’s not even the first time the line’s trains have suffered disruption this year.
Several disruptions happened in May and September 2022, bizarrely at almost exactly the same times of the month, four months apart. The timeline of these failures is as follows:
2nd May 2022: A train triggers the emergency brakes while travelling between the Dang Wangi and Kampung Baru stations at 11:20pm. It gets moved to KLCC for passengers to disembark, after which it is pulled out of service.
10th May 2022: A brake failure puts a train out of commission at the Taman Jaya station at 8:16am. Thereafter, passengers are required to get off at Asia Jaya and get on the next train to resume their journey.
20th May 2022: A brake calliper stops working on a train near the Pasar Seni station, so in the interest of public safety, it gets driven manually. While being moved to a pocket track at Universiti, the train breaks down completely at KL Sentral at 4:36pm. The repairs take exactly two hours to be completed, with operations resuming at 6:36pm.
24th May 2022: Just four days later, a circuit breaker, um, breaks at 8:36am, causing a power failure that grounds trains at the Taman Jaya station headed towards Putra Heights. Services resume at 8:48am.
2nd September 2022: A technical issue afflicts a train nearing Universiti at 9:40am, forcing 54 commuters to walk ten metres to the station. The affected train is removed from service and normal operations are resumed at 10:30am.
10th September 2022: Around 500 commuters are forced to leave a train at 8:26pm after the emergency brakes were triggered yet again near the Kampung Baru station. This causes an identical disruption to the one that happened on 20th May—the train gets moved to Universiti pocket track, and stalls at KL Sentral. This time, it disrupts services between the Bangsar and KLCC stations. Three hours later, it’s still being towed.
21st September 2022: A train experiences another technical issue at the Ampang Park station just before 6pm, causing services to run slower than usual. Normal operations resume at 6:30pm.
At least seven years of problems
The ever-increasing frequency of technical issues follows several years of problems hitting Klang Valley’s transit system, detailed in this fascinating Mashable SEA article. Of late, the majority of them have come from the ageing Kelana Jaya Line, which opened back in 1998:
22 July 2015: Brake failures occur at two different stations—Setiawangsa and Universiti.
9th September 2016: a train stops abruptly between the Dato Keramat and Damai stations, locking passengers in a vehicle with no power. The doors finally get opened 20 minutes later, with commuters—including a pregnant woman—being forced to walk in the rain for ten minutes to Damai.
31st March 2017: A technical glitch causes the entire line to grind to a halt, leaving hundreds of commuters stranded. Services are delayed by more than an hour.
9th September 2017: Exactly a year on, almost exactly the same issue—a train gets stranded between Setiawangsa and KLCC, trapping passengers inside for 20 minutes.
28th August 2018: Some 47 commuters get trapped in a train at the SS18 station, again for 20 minutes. Sound familiar?
21st December 2018: A brake failure alarm forces passengers to empty a train at Pasar Seni. The said train is immediately stopped at the Bangsar station after a “strange odour” emanated from under the carriage while being moved to Universiti pocket track.
18th February 2019: Stop me if you’ve heard this one before—an ATC failure causes a two-hour disruption between the Kelana Jaya and KLCC stations as the trains have to be driven manually.
30th May 2019: A traction power isolation cable fire between the Kampung Baru and KLCC stations forces all underground stations leading to Putra Heights to be shut down for nearly an hour for repairs.
The big crash
By far the most serious incident happened on 24th May last year. The Kelana Jaya Line was involved in a major accident when two LRT trains collided head-on, injuring 213 commuters, 47 of them seriously. RapidKL was able to commence operations on a single line the following morning as it worked to clear the carriages, with full services resuming on 28th May. In response, a nine-member investigation committee recommended 23 initiatives to improve the safety of the line, carried out over the course of the past year.
Minister of Transport Wee Ka Siong also unveiled an RM800 million refurbishment in May 2022 that would involve level four maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) of 28 trains, reducing the frequency of service from two and a half minutes to four. The minister promised an improvement to the frequency by August and said the works would be completed within six months (i.e. this month), after which the frequency was expected to improve to three minutes.
However, the company then issued a statement last month saying that it was still awaiting tachometers from Europe, which were expected to be delivered by December. These components had been delayed and were now expected to be delivered in stages until May 2023; RapidKL predicted it would only achieve the targeted three-minute frequency by September next year. The frequency currently stands at five minutes during peak hours and seven minutes during off-peak hours.
Separately, the company said it was in the process to receive 19 new train car sets as part of the Kuala Lumpur Additional Vehicles 27 (KLAV27) project, which will arrive in phases from July 2023 to December 2024. These will replace some of the two-car trains that have been in continuous operation since 1998.
Related reading
- Anthony Loke: Upgrading the entire LRT system top priority if Pakatan Harapan takes over govt
- LRT Kelana Jaya Line: 16 stations up to Ampang Park closed until 15 Nov as catastrophic failure strikes trains
- LRT Kelana Jaya Line closure: How did RapidKL get it so wrong?
- RapidKL rail services, including Ampang/Sri Petaling LRT line, affected by TNB power outage
