Day of the NEL

In my first-ever “tour” of Singapore’s latest pride and also the “world’s first heavy metro driverless mass transit train”, another idling friend and I took the NEL (or North-East Line) from Dhoby Ghaut to Sengkang and then back to HarbourFront yesterday, checking out the cool monorail-like Sengkang LRT along the way.

Our PM Goh grades the NEL “between 8 and 10” –- err… whatever that means.. hahaha.... Our verdict? More like 5 (almost fail) to maybe 7 1/2 (B-)??

Firstly, the plastic chairs are a hideous pinkish peach-light purple combi. One would imagine even a colour-blind person with better colour sense.. Then, for a $5bil high-tech system, it was really weird to see them fix the emergency button (which apparently got activated by accident a ridiculous number of times initially due to poor design) with short lengths of cheap ugly white pvc tubes (it’s really cheap-looking, and very funny..) But worse of all were the four to five unexplained “short delays” we encountered on this one single trip, which ranged from 15 second waits to one that stretched for some 10 minutes at least! And when the trains finally started moving again, no explanations and apologies! The NEL staff, in their lime-green uniforms, were walking around unhelpfully, like phantoms in this giant Matrix. The stations are also all identical-looking when you look out of the train to check which stop you are at (unlike the current MRT stations which are at least differentiated by their different coloured tiles), except for (once again, cheap-looking) A4-sized pieces of paper stuck up on pillars showing the station name and number. Well, at least some of the papers were slotted into clear plastic file pockets.. :p

Everyone in the train had this look of resignation whenever the train stops, as if they were almost used to it. Hey, I didn’t pay all those taxes for something like that, hor??? Sigh… worse thing is, SBS Transit's chief operating officer for rail, Mr Simon Lane was supposed to have said "The system will continue to have some teething problems. We expect the passenger experience to be as good tomorrow as it has been today.".. as good or as bad??