15 MRT Trains Running Again

Written by imoney

The Metro Rail Transit 3 (MRT) underwent an extensive 5-day maintenance work during the Holy Week break. After the engineers, technicians, and other personnels worked non-stop for 5 days, they finally made good on their promise with the Department of Transportation to deploy 15 fully operational trains earlier this week from just six trains since February.

The transportation undersecretary for railways TJ Batam said that with such number of trains now running, the wait time will be cut to just six minutes from over 10 minutes before the maintenance was done. Aside from that, it will also decrease the demand for Point-To-Point (P2P) buses which was implemented by the government to augment the MRT 3 operations. On April 3 (Monday), the 21 P2P buses only made 26 trips, which serviced only more than 1,600 passengers to Ortigas and Ayala.

This current fix that DOTR and their staff has made in MRT 3 is only the first phase of the MRT rehabilitation feat of the government. Batan added that the next target for them to hit is to have a total of 20 trains to operate.

The DOTr earlier said that Japan International Cooperation Agency’s nominated maintenance provider was expected to start working in May, following the system audit conducted by more than 50 Japanese railway engineers and experts who arrived in the country in February.
Based on MRT 3’s data, the biggest number of passengers it recorded was in August 2012 with over 622,000 riders. At three coaches each, the 15 trains can carry as many as 405,000 passengers daily while 20 trains will be able to ferry 540,000 passenger.

[Source]