The operator of Macau’s Light Rail Transit (LRT) announced yesterday that the city’s LRT passenger service will resume on Sunday, as the replacement of the system’s high-voltage cables has now been completed.
A statement by the government-owned LRT operator, Macau Light Rapid Transit Corporation Limited (MLM), said that various tests of the system have been passed after the completion of the cable replacement work.
After the LRT service is resumed, the statement said, the train schedule will run from 6:30 a.m. to 11:15 p.m. every day. Each train will depart every 10 to 15 minutes.
According to the statement, the first train will depart at 6:30 a.m. every day from both the western terminus – Ocean – and eastern terminus – Taipa Ferry Terminal – of the LRT Taipa-Cotai section, while the last train will depart at 11:15 p.m. every day from both the western and eastern terminus.
The LRT passenger service has been suspended since October 20 for the replacement of the system’s high-voltage cables. The cable replacement has been carried out by Japan’s Mitsubishi Heavy Industries free of charge, the supplier of Macau’s LRT system and trains.
The cable replacement work, including post-replacement tests before service resumption, was initially slated to take 180 days. Yesterday’s announcement means that the LRT service will resume around two weeks earlier than initially scheduled.
According to a government announcement in October about the cable replacement work, the LRT, which only covers Taipa and Cotai, had been hit by a host of technical failures since it opened in December 2019, because of which the government decided to carry out an investigation into the matter, the findings of which indicated that the repeated technical failures on the line were caused by the overheating of the high-voltage cables.
According to October’s announcement, the government decided to suspend the LRT passenger service for six months so that the replacement work could be carried out at full pace, instead of replacing the cables only during the non-service hours which would have taken two years, after considering the very low number of passengers due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to government announcements, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries has replaced 12 high-voltage cables of 22,000 volts with new ones with higher specifications.
The LRT only operates on the 9.3-kilometre-long Taipa section which includes Cotai. The Taipa-Cotai section, which started operating on December 10, 2019, has 11 stations.
The LRT system is owned by the local government through its Macau Light Rapid Transit Corporation Limited (MLM) but its operation has been outsourced to Hong Kong’s MTR Railway Operations (Macau) Company Limited.
The number of LRT passengers had fallen drastically due to declining visitor numbers in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, after the system recorded an average daily number of passengers of 33,000 and 16,000 in December 2019 and January 2020. Since the pandemic, the daily average number of LRT passengers had stood at just around 2,000 – before the system’s service suspension. Macau recorded its first COVID-19 case on January 22, 2020.
A number of projects to build new LRT sections are being carried out, such as the Taipa-Barra section, the Seac Pai Van section, and the Cotai-Hengqin section. They are slated to be completed in the next few years.
In addition, the government is planning to build a sea-crossing LRT section connecting the Barrier Gate land border checkpoint and the Taipa Ferry Terminal in Pac On via the Zone A and Zone E1 land reclamation areas. The government still hasn’t announced a schedule as to when the project, which is officially known as East Line, will get off the ground.
This file photo from the Macau Government Tourism Office (MGTO) last year shows a Light Rail Transit (LRT) train travelling in Cotai.
