KUALA LUMPUR, July 27 — Rapid Rail Sdn Bhd, which operates the city’s LRT system, attributed a severe slowdown of its service during the peak after office hour rush today to a faulty door on one of its Kelana Jaya rail line.
In a series of Twitter postings from 5.09pm onwards, the company said it had detected a fault on one of the doors on its carriages, forcing it into operate its usually driverless trains manually from its Masjid Jamek station onwards and thereby disrupting all services.
“KJ Line update: Manual driving in progress at Masjid Jamek Stn due to platform door fault. Our ops team is in midst rectifying the issue,” the public transportation company posted on Twitter at 5.36pm using the handle @MYRapidKL.
The most recent update at 7.35pm said that the rail service was still being manually operated.
In a statement, the company explained that the safety features on the train allowed the service to continue manually despite the technical glitch but at a much slower pace, which contributed to the congestion at certain stations.
“Due to the safety feature in the Kelana Jaya Line system, Gombak-bound trains were not able to travel automatically.
“The trains were driven manually at 1730hrs but at slower speed due to safety factor,” the statement read.
The cause of the technical malfunction is still being investigated, the statement added.
At 8:46pm, Rapid Rail tweeted that the Kelana Jaya service was back to normal, three hours after the malfunction was first detected.
Today’s faulty door is the latest in a growing number of unfortunate incidents plaguing the LRT service.
On two separate occasions last Tuesday, fires broke aboard the LRT carriages, which Rapid Rail attributed to brake failures on two of its four-car trains.
The two separate incidents occurred on the Gombak route, with the first happening at the Setiawangsa station at 8.19am and disrupting service for 30 minutes, the company said in a statement then.
The second incident happened a little after noon near the Universiti station, where another train had to be dispatched to rescue 53 passengers stranded upon the aboard brake-damaged train.
