Kuala Lumpur's Express Rail link opens in 2002 - Rapid Transit Review

International Railway Journal, May, 2001 by David Briginshaw

Kuala Lumpur's Express Rail Link Opens In 2002: Kuala Lumpur's long-awaited Express Rail Link, which will connect the city's new Central station with its international airport, is scheduled to open next year. It will provide a 28-minute journey time for the 57.6km link. (Rapid Transit Review)

WHEN the Malaysian government decided to build a new international airport (KLIA) about 50km south of Kuala Lumpur, a rail link to the city centre was envisaged as an essential means of getting people to and from the airport in a reasonable time. When the airport opened in 1998 in time for the Commonwealth Games, work on the rail link had not even begun. As a result, passengers and staff face a journey by road of up to one hour.

KLIA was conceived as a major hub airport for southeast Asia to rival Singapore and Bangkok. It currently has two runways and one satellite terminal. It expects to handle 17 million passengers this year, which is in line with

expectations, and has sufficient capacity to handle 30 million. A second satellite would double capacity, and there is room for two more runways and another two satellites which would boost capacity to 120 million passengers a year.

However, the delay in building the rail link may have damaged KLIA's competitive edge, as a number of major airlines, including Lufthansa, British Airways, and Qantas, have pulled out of KLIA this year in favour of Singapore, about 400km south of Kuala Lumpur, or Bangkok to the north. While this is unlikely to affect the number of passengers travelling to and from the Kuala Lumpur area, it will deprive Malaysia of the increasing number of passengers travelling between Europe and Australasia who choose to break their journeys en route.

The Express Rail Link (ERL) is effectively two railways in one. The Airport Express service, which will open on April 19 2002, will run non-stop every 15 minutes through-out the day. An additional commuter rail service, running at 30-minute intervals to serve the three intermediate stations, will open on June 19 2002. The railway is designed to allow the Airport Express to operate at 10-minute headways and the commuter service at 20-minute intervals. It will also be possible to run eight-car or eventually 12-car trains.

The Malaysian government has designated a 15 by 50km area between Kuala Lumpur and KLIA as a Multimedia Super Corridor offering tax concessions and other incentives to attract high-tech industries. The corridor includes two new cities: Putrajaya, the new Malaysian capital which is now taking shape, and Cyberjaya, a so called intelligent city of multimedia industries, research and development centres, and company headquarters. A multimedia university has already opened in Cyberjaya. ERL is seen as a vital catalyst to stimulate development in the corridor.

Putrajaya was planned with light rail in mind. LRT tunnels were built before construction of the city started. However, since then a local company, Monorail Malaysia Technology, has developed a monorail system which is being installed in Kuala Lumpur and now Putrajaya and eventually Cyberjaya. The monorail will connect with ERL at Putrajaya station.

ERL is being constructed under a 30-year design, finance, construct, manage, operate and maintain concession. ERLSB is the client and has two shareholders: Tabung Haji Technologies (THT) with a 60% stake, and YTL Corporation with 40%. THT was originally set up to organise pilgrimages to Mecca, but has since diversified into other activities. YTL is a civil engineering company. A turnkey contract was awarded to SYZ, a consortium of Siemens for the electro-mechanical part (59%) and YTL for the civil works (41%).

Funding for the DM 1 billion ($US 458.7 million) project is split 50:50 foreign to local content. The foreign component is funded by KfW and three German banks. The local content is funded equally between the Malaysian government and shareholders' equity. The project is expected to break even after 13 years.

A company called Express Rail Link Maintenance Support (EMAS) has been formed by Siemens (51%) and ERLSB (49%) to operate and maintain the railway under a Ringgits 103.5 million ($US 27.2 million) contract. ERLSB has an option to buy Siemens out during the first three years, and Siemens can sell its share to ERLSB at the end of the first three years of operation. Siemens is taking the railway-related risk, while ERLSB is responsible for the commercial risk.

"The three-year operation and maintenance deal gives us time to get the railway operating properly," said Dipl-Ing Udo Goldenstein, project director and leader of the SYZ Consortium. "The client didn't want to be in between contractors and operators especially as the client does not have any railway experience."

In order to achieve a 28-minute non-stop journey time, the line will be standard gauge-Malayan Railway's (KTM) national network is metre gauge--with a maximum speed of 160km/h. The main problem has been to fit the railway between existing structures in Kuala Lumpur, where rapid development has taken place in recent years. In addition, there is no overall plan to work to, and land ownership is often difficult to determine. However, the Malaysian government has a simple systems to resolve disputes: all the parties involved are brought together to thrash out a solution on the spot. A typical example is at KLIA, where provision was made for the Airport Express island platform under the main airport terminal, but there was no provision for a separate platform for the commuter rail service. The solution was to build an extra platform on the approach to the Airport Express platform where, fortunately, space exists.