SINGAPORE: A fire broke out at a train depot on Wednesday (Sep 18), causing Circle Line services to be disrupted for the second time in as many days.
Transport operator SMRT said in a Facebook post on Wednesday evening that a fire broke out in one of the power system cubicles at the Kim Chuan Depot at about 8pm. It resulted in a power trip that disrupted the power supply to the Circle Line.
“This caused some trains to stall, and lighting within the trains were affected,” said SMRT. It added that the fire was extinguished by engineers on-site
“The Singapore Civil Defence Force was also activated, and we restored power supply by 8.10pm. All trains resumed movement, and normal services resumed at around 8:15pm,” said SMRT, apologising for the disruption caused to commuters.
Wednesday’s 15-minute disruption came after a power fault at 5.50pm on Tuesday disrupted train services on the Circle Line for nearly two hours, affecting peak-hour travel for scores of commuters.
Eleven trains stalled in the Circle Line tunnels for 15 minutes during the outage, leaving passengers without air-conditioning although the onboard battery provided partial lighting and ventilation.
Train services then progressively resumed, before SMRT announced in an update at about 7.40pm that services had “fully resumed to normal”.
SMRT said earlier on Wednesday that staff worked late into the night to complete the engineering diagnosis and ensure that systems were functioning.