Malaysia’s Light Rail Transit Train Doors Stay Open While Moving, Just Two Months After Collision Incident

Just two months have passed since the collision between two trains on the Malaysian Light Rail Transit system, a new video has gone viral showing the gaping doors of the coach as the train moved at high speeds. The short video, filmed by a passenger called Sofeana, was uploaded onto her Twitter account and it has, at the time of writing, garnered over 925,000 views.

and suddenly i feel like I’m in divergent @MyRapidKL what is this behaviour ? pic.twitter.com/PpyjAiXLQn

— ?? (@perksofbeingsxf) July 27, 2021

The coach looked relatively empty and the few passengers that were in it were seen seated near the open doors, seemingly filming the doors on their phones. In an interview with SAYS, Sofeana said that the incident took place at around three o’clock in the afternoon on the 26th of July 2021, between the Lembah Subang and Ara Damansara stations.

Apparently, the doors had initially closed after passengers boarded the coach but opened up when the train started moving. It then closed again when the train stopped at the next station. But by then the train operators were aware of the malfunction and the train was immediately taken out of service.

The next day, the Transport Ministry announced that the incident was due to the malfunction of a door close confirmation unit (DCCU). However, the question of whether the root cause was due to poor maintenance or failure to adhere to standard operating procedures when attending to technical issues remains to be answered after further investigation.

While no one was hurt, the public remains wary, suspicious and some even angry as the memory of the 24 May collision is still fresh on their minds. During that incident, over 210 passengers suffered injuries, 47 of them serious. The news of the collision had first broke on social media and spread via the forwarding of images and videos of bloodied passengers through Whatsapp. Further investigation of that incident found that the failure of the hostler, who was manually driving one of the trains, and the control centre in adhering to SOPs ultimately led to the two trains colliding.

The least that Malaysians can hope for this time is that the new Prasarana CEO handles this recent incident better than the last one did.