KUALA LUMPUR, Feb 11 — All but one underground tunnel for the Klang Valley Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) project are now completed and ready for track work, MRT Corporation Sdn Bhd said today.

The newly appointed chief executive officer Datuk Seri Shahril Mokhtar said overall progress of the project is about 58.5 per cent done, while underground work and construction of elevated sections were at 73.0 per cent and 49.2 per cent, respectively.

“So as promised, I am very confident that we will be able to achieve phase one by December 2016, which is from Sungai Buloh until Semantan station, and phase two, the rest of the line in July 2017,” he told reporters after a media site visit of the tunnel from the Cochrane station to the Tun Razak Exchange station.

According to the project director Marcus Karakashian, seven out of eight tunnels have been completed and only the one between the Pasar Seni and Stadium Merdeka stations is still in the progress.

The tunnel visited by the media today leads up to the five-storey Tun Razak Exchange station, and is 250m long, 41m wide and at a depth of 45, the deepest of the seven.

According to Karakashian, it is specifically designed to be the interchange station for proposed Line 2, the MRT Sungai Buloh-Serdang-Putrajaya line.

Karakashian said the mega project has reached a crucial phase where the system works can begin, which include the laying of railway tracks for the line, the purchasing and commissioning of trains, installation of the power supply for the trains, signalling, communications and others.

On the operations side, Shahril said although the business model between MRT Corp and operator Rapid Rail Sdn Bhd, a subsidiary of Prasarana Negara Berhad, is still being ironed out, it has been decided that MRT Corp will handle the ancillary revenue streams including retail and advertising while Rapid Rail will be in charge of operations.

As for the Line 2 of the MRT line, he said the Land Public Transport Commission (SPAD) had in December given the conditional approval and there will be a public display of the proposed alignment during the second quarter of this year.