Everything Also Complain

From ‘So, was door of moving train open?’, article by Rachel Chang, 22 June 2012, ST

TRAIN operator SMRT has assured passengers that its trains will not be able to move off if the doors are not properly closed. This is in response to a picture posted online of a train supposedly running with one of its doors open.

‘We wish to reassure commuters that the MRT system is built with many fail-safe features to ensure passenger safety,’ the company said in a statement yesterday. SMRT also said it has looked into the matter and questioned the veracity of the picture.

…It also said that Ms Samantha Francis (content producer of STOMP), 23, who claimed to have taken the picture at Lakeside MRT station on Tuesday night, was not actually at the MRT station that day. This assertion is based on CCTV footage and Ms Francis’ ez-link card details, it added.

In the statement, an SMRT spokesman also said that the railings of the train tracks visible in the picture do not match those at Lakeside MRT.

No Open Door Policy

You know a nation is deprived of worthy news when it is gripped by something like a train door refusing to close, sensationalising it to a ‘mystery’ and ‘web of intrugue’ of detective story proportions. People seem more interested in knowing if (Oops!) SMRT did it again, rather than speculating why rich foreigners are falling more than 50 floors to their grisly deaths off Skypark, Marina Bay Sands. Where were the CCTVs then? Since Stomp’s Samantha has stepped up to defend allegations of duping the nation and no record of her presence was found, it’s either she got the station wrong, or she’s a shape-shifting vampire who can pass through gantries undetected and whose image evades video capture. That at least explains why she works for a soul-sucking website that encourages and rewards the shaming of innocent people in public, even if some ‘content’ turn out to be hoaxes like ‘Woman combs armpit hair on MRT’.

 In all these years in service, SMRT has accepted partial responsibility for crushing people on the tracks, apologised for breakdowns, lapses in security against Swiss graffitti artists, overcrowded trains and platforms , but fully stands by the mechanics of their train doors. Perhaps the fact that they’re are so good at clamping objects like grocery bags adds further support to use ‘fail-safes’ as a valid reason to question Samantha’s snapshot as physically impossible. It’s also the last saving grace for SMRT; they’ve had their share of cable tie, signal and power cable woes, even their escalators occasionally fall apart,  but hey, at least their  DOORS are still fully functional.

Fail-safe but not fruit-safe

Or are they? In 2010, SMRT conceded that the doors CAN OPEN A BIT when on the move, creating a maximum allowable gap of 10cm. Called a ‘push-back’ device, this is useful in a situation where things get trapped, like say the bag of fruits above. Is it then physically possible for a few strong men to overcome the opposing push-pull forces and pry a door open by more than 10cm? Judging by how someone had to break a window during the North-South Line breakdown for air, probably not. But curiously enough, this isn’t the first time that someone has complained of train doors opening in between stations, with SMRT again raising the guardian spectre that is the ‘fail-safe’ mechanism in their statement in 2010:

The train has been withdrawn from service and we are currently performing checks,’ the spokesman said, adding that all LRT trains are equipped with fail-safe features to ensure passenger safety. For example, a system ensures that trains will not be able to move off if the train doors are not properly closed.

Treating a hidden set of levers and pistons as a PR fairy godmother who comes to your rescue aside, what’s important here is nobody fell out of the gaping hole, if it in fact existed. And like their motto of ‘Moving People’ suggests, SMRT should do the same for this matter, do the necessary service checks and everybody just MOVE on already. If there’s anything good coming about this, no matter what the outcome and whether Ms Francis keeps her job, it’s that you’ll think twice before leaning against train doors, and especially think twice before posting anything from Stomp on Facebook.

Postscript: SPH editor in chief Patrick Daniel eventually apologised to SMRT for what turned out to be firstly a photo deliberately taken out of context (it was believed to be taken at a terminal station instead of actually moving) and a brazen attempt by Samantha Francis to con SMRT, resulting in her sacking. But what’s worrying about this case is the source of the photo, which Samantha claims to be taken off Twitter. Let’s hope it remains a microblogging tool rather than a microstomping one.

Filed under: 2000s, 2010, 2012, Bloggers, MRT Tagged: | bloggers, MRT, SMRT, stomp