SINGAPORE – Commuters travelling westwards from Pasir Ris MRT station will experience shorter waiting times when a railway turnback there is completed by the middle of 2024.
In a Facebook post on Thursday night, Senior Minister Teo Chee Hean said the quicker turnaround of trains at the turnback will result in a 20 per cent increase in the number of trains running during peak hours.
Currently, 30 trains operate per hour during the peak, but this number will increase to 36 per hour when the structure is complete, with an additional 9,000 commuters able to board the trains.
Announced in 2018, work on the railway turnback had started in 2019.
Although it was expected to be completed by 2023, construction delays brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic caused its completion to be pushed back a year.
With the Pasir Ris station being the terminal station for the East-West Line (EWL), the cross tracks of the railway turnback will allow trains to switch between the two directions more efficiently than with existing crossings, said the Land Transport Authority (LTA) in 2018.
This means that trains can change directions faster to head westwards on the line, and thus meet future increases in ridership demand, LTA added.
On Thursday, the last of the 36 beams used in the structure was launched, with each beam measuring up to 25m long and weighing up to 260 tonnes.
Work on the decking, rails, cross track and signalling has since started.
