This article first appeared in The Edge Financial Daily, on January 19, 2016.

KUALA LUMPUR: Prasarana Malaysia Bhd said the first of its 14 new Innovia Metro 300 trains will be operational by May this year, while the remainder of the trains will be delivered one each month by Bombardier Transportation and its consortium partner Hartasuma Sdn Bhd.

The new four-car trains, to increase capacity and improve the quality of public transportation in Kuala Lumpur, will be deployed along the extended Kelana Jaya light rail transit (LRT) line, which is also on tract for its scheduled completion by June 30, said Prasarana group managing director Datuk Azmi Abdul Aziz.

“The new trains will offer a quieter ride, dynamic station indicators, and handicap facilities. We also expect to improve waiting time, reducing headway (the average interval between vehicles moving in the same direction on the same route) to less than the current 2.8 minutes.

“It is not about injecting the trains throughout the whole line. We have to look at where demand is building up and we’ll set the new trains there,” said Azmi at a press briefing yesterday.

The Kelana Jaya line extension, which will begin from the Kelana Jaya station and pass through 13 new stations, including Ara Damansara, Subang Jaya and USJ before ending at the Putra Heights integrated station, covers a distance of 17.4km. The line’s full length, upon completion of the LRT, will be 46.4km.

Azmi added that the new trains will be able to handle up to an additional 20 passengers per car, from the existing capacity of 200 passengers per car, and expects the new trains to boost public transportation usage.

According to him, the last of the trains should be delivered by the Bombardier-Hartasuma consortium by June 2017.

Bombardier president of division systems for Asia and Australia, Pierre Attendu, said the plane and train maker is currently working on train set No 5, with one in transit to the facility in Westport.

“We have two months of transit time between Canada and Malaysia, and the trains will be kept here (Westport facility) for an additional three weeks to a month. So it takes about four months for the new trains to become operational,” said Attendu.

The trains, designed, constructed and tested at Bombardier’s Centre of Competence for Mass Transit Systems in Kingston, Canada, are transferred to Hartasuma’s Westport facility for the installation of interiors, final completion, as well as final testing.

The contract for the 14 four-car trains was awarded by Prasarana to the Bombardier-Hartasuma consortium two years ago, for a contract value of RM577.6 million.

Azmi assured yesterday that the fluctuation in foreign-exchange rates has not affected the original provisions — or value — of the contract.

As for the LRT Line 3 project, which will cover a distance of 36km from Bandar Utama to Klang, Azmi said the pre-qualification for the civil contractors was closed last year and that the pre-qualification for the system works will be completed sometime in February.