Intro: Scomi Engineering at the forefront leading the way
2014 has proven to be an excellent year for the monorail industry. India introduced its 1st monorail, the Mumbai Monorail; Brazil awarded a PPP contract for its 3rd monorail line and now Malaysia has launched the expansion of its Kuala Lumpur Monorail (KL Monorail) from a 2-car train system to a 4-car train system.
Leading all of this growth is Scomi Engineering Berhad (“Scomi Engineering”), the Malaysian public listed company that is also one of three leading providers of monorail systems.
Within the year, Scomi Engineering has commissioned two monorail systems and these are the only two systems successfully commissioned in the year. In February, the Mumbai Monorail was launched and Scomi Engineering together with its Consortium partner Larsen & Toubro Limited now runs the operations and maintenance for the complete system. For the Mumbai Monorail,Scomi Engineering provided the complete value chain for a monorail system from design, build, integrate to operations & maintenance.
The other Scomi Engineering commissioned system during the year is a brownfield project, the upgrade of the KL monorail.Scomi Engineering is the first monorail technology group to successfully carry out an upgrade of an existing system, seamlessly integrating the components and sub-systems of the existing and new system.The upgrade included the complete Electrical and Mechanical systems, with a new signalling system as part of the works;the civil upgrade of all the existing KL Monorail stations to accommodate the 4-car trains, upgrade of the existing depot and the provision of the new KL Monorail 4-car trains sets.
In Brazil, Scomi Engineering functions as the technology provider to the Consortium which was awarded the Sao Paulo Line 18 monorail project. This is the 3rd monorail project in Brazil and Scomi Engineering is involved in all of the three projects. Additionally for this 3rd project, Scomi Engineering is also providing the operations and maintenance services.
Mumbai Monorail went “live” on 2nd February ferrying passengers from Wadala to Chembur. Mumbai Monorail with its Phase 1 alignment of 8.9km on the projected low ridership segment of the full 19.68km alignment has an average daily ridership of 14,000. Over 4.2 million passengers have used the services of Mumbai Monorail in its 10 months of operations. The maiden monorail project in India started with eight hours of service per day and the consortium of Larsen & Toubro and Scomi Engineering Bhd (LTSE) were ready to increase service hours within the first month. Services were increased in phases in April and August to run the current 16 hours of service. The increase in service hours was seamless and LTSE continues to maintain a service reliability percentage well above the contractual 97% service reliability requirement. It was projected that the terminal station, Chembur, would have a footfall of 600 passengers during peak hours in 2031, however we are currently experiencing average footfall of 900 passengers during peak hour. This is testimony of the benefit that the monorail brings to the public.
The KL Monorail, with the world’s first of its kind, mixed fleet operations consisting of both 2-car train sets and 4-car train sets went “live” on 21st December 2014.The KL Monorail, an 8.6km alignment that links the Kuala Lumpur Sentral transport hub to the Golden Triangle central business district, has an average daily ridership of 65,000 passengers, generally running at 35% over capacity during peak hours.With the newly introduced Scomi Engineering trains, the capacity has doubled providing greater frequency as well as better passenger comfort. On the first day of services, passengers were full of praise for the new trains that are more spacious, disabled friendly and most of all encouraging for people to use the public transport.
The growth of the monorail in different parts of the globe is certainly proving its worth as a viable transport solution. The benefits that it brings to urban infrastructure such as its slim and simple construction, mano euvrability and environmentally friendly as it does not use any fossil fuel and generates low decibels of noise is immense. In densely populated cities, be it people population or ground vehicular population, the monorail creates an alternative dedicated transport corridor that not only decongests the roads but creates greater inter connectivity.
Having won four out of the six monorail contracts tendered globally, Scomi Engineering is at the forefront of urban transport solutions. Breaking through and creating new markets, Scomi Engineering continues to drive the monorail as an important solution in India, Colombo, Thailand and several other Eastern Hemisphere countries.
The many firsts that the monorail has enjoyed in 2014 :
- 1st monorail solution in India
- 1stM PPP Monorail contract for an urban transport solution globally, in Brazil
- 1st mixed fleet monorail system in the world
MUMBAI MONORAIL OPERATIONS & MAINTENANCE FACT SHEET :
| No | Description | Status |
| 1. | Operations Timings |
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| 2. | Increase in Operations Timings | Seamless operations during increase of service hours
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| 3. | Punctuality | 98.24% |
| 4. | Ridership | Average Per Day : 14,000 |
| 5. | Health & Safety |
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