My mouth was probably agape as I listened intently while San Miguel CEO Ramon Ang briefed us about what he was doing with the MRT-7 project. He had his fingers in every aspect of the undertaking.
He told us he asked added gauges for the rails, intervened in the design of the rail cars to make them lighter by using aluminum bodies and specified the highest standard steel for the bogeys that linked the rail cars. He made sure the elevated structure was better than specification, added the depth of the gravels ballasts to reduce damage to the rails. He ordered a third more cars than specified so that the trains could go on periodic maintenance servicing like jet planes do.
Will this not make the project costlier? “It is first and foremost a public service,” he said. This system will not burden commuters with frequent breakdowns.
As for the costs, he says they will still be lower than if government built the system. The over-designed MRT-7 will run smoothly for decades.
That is the opposite of the attitude taken by those who built the MRT-3. In the first 15 days of December, the MRT-3 operations broke down 16 times. It will not get better anytime soon. It can only get worse.
Every aspect of the MRT-3 appears under-designed. Corners were cut on nearly every aspect.
MRT-3 uses overweight trams converted into rapid transit trains by lifting the cars to align with the stations. There was a mismatch from the very start.
A few months after it started operating, maintenance provider Sumitomo discovered several cracked bogeys. The engineers suspected that either inferior steel was used for them or the Czech supplier delivered refurbished parts.
As early as the first year of operations, the rail system experienced too much shelling and damage to the tracks. Two things explain this: the rails were of inferior quality and the gravels ballasts were too thin to soften the impact of train wheels. Those train wheels wore out easily, explaining the swaying motion of the MRT-3.
In the Makati area, the rails were found to be misaligned, causing the trains to twist and vibrate. Engineers surmise the reason for this is that two separate contractors built the rails and failed to align them properly.
In 2003, the Czech suppliers were summoned to examine the flaws in the system. They recommended horizontal dampers be installed to absorb the excessive lateral vibrations and mitigate damage to the rail cars. Sumitomo took no corrective action. We inherit rolling wrecks as a consequence.
Cesar Chavez, before he resigned as DOTr Undersecretary for Rails, was obsessed with getting maintenance provider Busan out and bringing Sumitomo back in. He succeeded in getting Busan out, but did nothing about the structural flaws in this system. He withheld monthly payments to Buri from September last year and expected the company to deliver.
In the meantime, in-house crews do the sophisticated maintenance work needed on a daily basis. Less than a third of the trains are in use, causing the long queues and the overcrowding that further deteriorates the system.
Since Abaya’s mis-designed Dalian trains are unusable, we could run out of trains for this dinosaur of a mass transit system. Good luck to all of us.
He told us he asked added gauges for the rails, intervened in the design of the rail cars to make them lighter by using aluminum bodies and specified the highest standard steel for the bogeys that linked the rail cars. He made sure the elevated structure was better than specification, added the depth of the gravels ballasts to reduce damage to the rails. He ordered a third more cars than specified so that the trains could go on periodic maintenance servicing like jet planes do.
Will this not make the project costlier? “It is first and foremost a public service,” he said. This system will not burden commuters with frequent breakdowns.
As for the costs, he says they will still be lower than if government built the system. The over-designed MRT-7 will run smoothly for decades.
That is the opposite of the attitude taken by those who built the MRT-3. In the first 15 days of December, the MRT-3 operations broke down 16 times. It will not get better anytime soon. It can only get worse.
Every aspect of the MRT-3 appears under-designed. Corners were cut on nearly every aspect.
MRT-3 uses overweight trams converted into rapid transit trains by lifting the cars to align with the stations. There was a mismatch from the very start.
A few months after it started operating, maintenance provider Sumitomo discovered several cracked bogeys. The engineers suspected that either inferior steel was used for them or the Czech supplier delivered refurbished parts.
As early as the first year of operations, the rail system experienced too much shelling and damage to the tracks. Two things explain this: the rails were of inferior quality and the gravels ballasts were too thin to soften the impact of train wheels. Those train wheels wore out easily, explaining the swaying motion of the MRT-3.
In the Makati area, the rails were found to be misaligned, causing the trains to twist and vibrate. Engineers surmise the reason for this is that two separate contractors built the rails and failed to align them properly.
In 2003, the Czech suppliers were summoned to examine the flaws in the system. They recommended horizontal dampers be installed to absorb the excessive lateral vibrations and mitigate damage to the rail cars. Sumitomo took no corrective action. We inherit rolling wrecks as a consequence.
Cesar Chavez, before he resigned as DOTr Undersecretary for Rails, was obsessed with getting maintenance provider Busan out and bringing Sumitomo back in. He succeeded in getting Busan out, but did nothing about the structural flaws in this system. He withheld monthly payments to Buri from September last year and expected the company to deliver.
In the meantime, in-house crews do the sophisticated maintenance work needed on a daily basis. Less than a third of the trains are in use, causing the long queues and the overcrowding that further deteriorates the system.
Since Abaya’s mis-designed Dalian trains are unusable, we could run out of trains for this dinosaur of a mass transit system. Good luck to all of us.
