PETALING JAYA: The opening of the Shah Alam LRT, formerly known as LRT3, will likely be pushed back to the end of the year after failing to meet its previous Sept 30 target.
In a memo sighted by The Star, Prasarana Malaysia Bhd president and group chief executive officer Amir Hamdan expressed hope that there will be no more delays so that the project can open for service in December.
Prasarana is currently making a final effort to certify its new train fleet for service.
In the memo titled ‘Call to prayer’, addressed to his workforce, Amir said it is time to “collectively undertake supplicatory prayers for the project”.
“God willing, the project will enter into a critical phase called the fault-free run (FFR) on Aug 25.
“We pray that this test will go smoothly as planned with no more delays so that we can complete the project in time for launch.
“I am sincerely appealing to all within Prasarana to pray for blessings and protection so that things will go well for us,” said Amir, the former head of Rapid Rail Sdn Bhd, the Prasarana subsidiary in charge of rail services.
He was promoted to his current position on Aug 15, taking over from Mohd Azharuddin Mat Sah.
FFR is a gruelling mandatory test where all train sets will have to clock a minimum testing mileage – typically a few thousand kilometres – without demonstrating any major fault to ensure safety and reliability before they are put into service.
The challenge for the contractor is that any significant fault encountered resets the testing mileage back to zero, meaning the test has to undergo a full restart.
For most of the year, officials did not give any hint that the Shah Alam line would miss its Sept 30 target. Transport Minister Anthony Loke, in a written parliamentary reply on July 30, stated that as of July 10, the project was at the 99.21% mark with no mention of any delay.
On July 25, Prasarana published a social media post stating that trains would be “tested round-the-clock” until Oct 31, effectively acknowledging that there would be no service in September.
The post has since been amended to remove any dates after The Star ran a story about the delay on Aug 4.
The 37km Shah Alam line is critical for residents of Klang and Shah Alam who have put up with severely disrupted KTM Komuter services on account of the ongoing Klang Valley Double Track (KVDT) rehabilitation programme undertaken by KTMB.
The KVDT rehabilitation is expected to take years to resolve.
The Shah Alam LRT begins at Johan Setia in Klang before ending at Bandar Utama in Petaling Jaya, where commuters can easily transfer to the Kajang MRT at the same location.
The Shah Alam line has been subjected to various changes since the change in the Federal Government in May 2018, especially in the form of downscaling and cost-cutting, which resulted in various variations to the specifications and project management structure.
Prasarana had announced in Sept 2015 that MRCB George Kent Sdn Bhd (a joint venture between Malaysian Resources Corporation Bhd and George Kent Sdn Bhd) had been appointed as the project delivery partner (PDP) for the project that was officially launched by then prime minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak on Aug 24, 2016.
Following the jettisoning of the PDP model for a fixed-price turnkey contract in November 2018, the contractor was rebranded as Setia Utama LRT3 Sdn Bhd.
It was noted that the delays in starting the FFR this year were due to several issues, particularly in the systems integration area where parts like signalling, communications and electrification need to be thoroughly tested to ensure they all work together smoothly as one system.
Later this week, the first of the 22 trains will commence an intensive test run, during which it must successfully complete 4,000km without any issues, while the remainder of the fleet is required to cover a minimum of 2,000km each.
In addition, each train must be able to complete the end-to-end journey in no more than 60 minutes at intervals of no more than six minutes between each train so that the entire network can move 18,630 passengers per hour per direction.
