By Aerol John Pateña/PNA
MANILA — The Metro Rail Transit Line 3 (MRT-3) has recorded 31 consecutive days of no unloading incidents from October 16 to November 15, 2018.
This was the longest “no offloading” streak recorded by the railway system as it surpassed the 29 consecutive days without unloading incidents it achieved from July 4 to August 1, 2018, the Department of Transportation-MRT-3 (DOTr MRT-3) said on Friday.
“We attribute the 31-day no-offloading streak of MRT-3 to three things. These are: regular maintenance works of our trains to make sure that we give our commuters a safe and reliable transport every day; availability of spare parts taking note that we are only using original spare parts for our trains; and focus and teamwork,” DOTr MRT-3 said in a statement.
This development came after the recent signing of the Department of Finance (DOF) and the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) of the PHP18 billion (38-billion Japanese yen) loan agreement for the MRT rehabilitation project.
Sumitomo-Mitsubishi Heavy Industries is set to take over the rehabilitation and maintenance of the MRT-3. The consortium designed and built the railway system from 1998 to 2000 and maintained the system from 2000 to 2012.
The upgrade of the MRT-3 which is set to start by January next year is projected to last for three and a half years.
The DOTr expects the operations of the MRT to gradually improve starting on the third quarter of next year.
The MRT-3 currently runs an average of 15 trains daily with headway time of seven minutes serving around 300,000 passengers.
