Fixing Outram Park

2022 Update: the new paid EWL-NEL transfer linkway is now open. Rest of post left here for posterity.

I just remembered I was supposed to write about the Thomson Line works at Outram Park. Yes. I’m forgetful and distracted (and not dead yet?)

I’m sure everyone’s seen the construction works at Outram Park station, with the entire surface around Outram Road being torn up and redone. But why, you ask, when the TEL station is on the other side nearer to Pearl’s Centre?

That’s simple. I think everyone knows that the current interchange passageway between the EWL and NEL is just getting along. It’s small, cramped, and often crowded. Thus, it would seem apparent to me that with the coming of the TEL, which will make Outram Park a 3-line interchange (and the increased passenger load that means), LTA used the opportunity to expand the current station and future proof it for more passengers.

What was the deal?

Back in the 1990s when they were planning the North East Line, it was originally intended to place the NEL station at where Pearl’s Centre is now. As such, a section of the north wall of Outram Park EWL station was designed to facilitate a future connection to this new station.

Plans later changed and the NEL station was put south of the Outram Road/Eu Tong Sen St junction, and since it would have been plenty of trouble to reuse the provided connection point, it was decided to build a new connection beneath the station, directly connecting to the platform level. And since digging under a live station is never an easy task, the current small walkways were all they could do. You can see the same at Bishan, at the connection to the northbound NSL platform.

Of course, if you haven’t noticed the trend here of an under-specced and under designed MRT system that was caught by surprise with the rapid population increase in Singapore, here’s another symptom. It was soon clear to the planners that the current linkway was inadequate to meet the needs of the entire station. But the good news is, with the construction of the Thomson Line, an opportunity arose to put things right.

What is to be done?

To replace the current road crossings (an overhead bridge from the EWL station to the bus stop across, and a traffic light crossing to HSA opposite), they’re building a new underpass across the road, which will connect to both the EWL concourse (near the escalators up to street level), and the NEL (at the base of the escalators leading to exit E). Since the construction of these underpasses would mean that they have to tear up the roads anyway, they went and dug deeper to the current interchange level.

At this lower level, we will see many more new walkways (at least, according to information available at the Project Information Centre):

• the current one will be joined to a new walkway (I’ll call this passage A), from somewhere around where the NEL lift is, to new escalators to be built, which will lead up to somewhere around door 6 of the westbound EWL platform. This will also continue to another pair of escalators, up to the north end of the TEL platform
• a new walkway to the NEL, from the south end of the TEL platform (passage B), leading to where the sharp 90 degree turn at the NEL end of the current passageway (passage C) is

Of course, the question you and I both have now is, why go to all the trouble of ripping up Outram Road to build these walkways? Of course they could have deployed the rectangular TBMs that are being tested at quite a few points along the line, but I would think that having 2 operational train stations around the site would have made things difficult. In short, I’m of the opinion that it would have been just as much trouble to build each of these new networks of passageways than it would have been to build the original one at the turn of the millennium.

What can happen?

So we’ve established that while there will be new walkways, they will most likely be as cramped and inefficiently used as the old one, if how management of such expansions go as they usually do. Call me a pessimist, but between technical challenges and the conservative attitudes preferred by our railway designers, I don’t see that changing.

Someone more optimistic than me, with a short examination of the intended design, would think that with two parallel passageways leading to roughly the same place, there would be no better time than now to implement a one-way system of transfers. That way, even if the walkway has to be small and cramped, there’s no swimming against the current as everyone’s going the same way.

Without seeing it in practice it’s hard to tell how it will work (this is Singapore after all, transparency isn’t exactly a word in the dictionary around here), but we can guess. For example, I’d use Passage A for passengers going towards the EWL and TEL from the NEL, and passages B and C for those who want to use the NEL. And interchanges between the EWL and TEL would use the shared concourse, which will be expanded (much like HarbourFront now) to serve the TEL station as well.

This would of course require coordination between station staff at all three of the linked stations, so as to designate which walkways serve which direction of transferring passengers. Or LTA would dictate it from above, as they usually do. Remember, the rail financing model in Singapore means that each line, and their respective stations, are under separate management. Personally, I’m not a fan of this model, but I guess I can discuss it somewhere else.

I guess as the old saying goes, when life gives you lemons… Of course, we do pull off engineering marvels here and there, but considering the initial design constraints and the fact that we can always learn from others…

EDIT: Just after I ran this article, LTA published a factsheet about the works at Orchard. The idea is similar, just that it’s a lot more fun in the Orchard area because of ION and the NSL station above. And yes, the light blue bits are directly under the NSL platform.