Alstom has been awarded a contract worth €28 million by Mass Transit Railway (MTR) Corporation to replace the track circuits of five MTR lines—Island Line (ISL), Kwun Tong Line (KTL), Tsuen Wan Line (TWL), East Harbor Crossing (EHC) section of Tseung Kwan O Line (TKL), and Tung Chung Line (TCL)— and Airport Express in Hong Kong’s metro network by early 2019.
Metro track circuits, which are part of the signalling system, are used to ensure the integrity of the rails and detect the position of the trainsets on the lines. The original track circuits for the six lines were supplied and installed by Alstom between 1985 and 1998. These will now be replaced with Alstom’s latest generation of track circuits to function for another 20 years. No interruptions will occur on the lines, as the works will be performed during the non-traffic hours.
This project will be led by Alstom Hong Kong and supported by the Alstom signalling teams in Saint-Ouen, France.
Alstom has been a partner of MTR Corporation for the last 40 years. Since the first metro project in Hong Kong in 1975, Alstom has supplied over 1,100 metro cars to MTR and equipped six lines with signalling systems. In January 2015, Alstom, as part of a consortium, won the signaling system replacement project in Hong Kong which aims to renovate the signalling system of six MTR lines and the Airport Express over a period of 10 years.