Singapore Railways History
The first railway in Singapore was built by the Tanjong Pagar dock company in 1877 and ran along their wharves. It was operated by two locomotives supplied by Dick & Stevenson. Next came the Singapore Steam Tramway in 1885. This closed by 1894 and the stock was disposed of to the Tanjong Pagar Dock Company and Penang Steam Tramway. The Singapore Railway Line was built from Singapore station, opposite Read Road at the southern foot of Fort Canning and ran to Woodlands Station which was located on the coast opposite Johore. It was mooted as early as the 1860s, approved by the Legislative Council in 1899 and completed in 1903 at a cost of $2 million. Management of the Singapore Railway operations, buildings and land were transferred to the Federated Malay States Railway (FMSR) in 1918 for over $4 million. The Malayan Railway Administration – predecessor of Keretapi Tanah Melayu Berhad – was established in 1948. The terminus in Singapore was the Tanjong Pagar Railway Station.
Plans to build a railway line through Singapore, primarily to service the New Harbour (later known as Keppel Harbour) were mooted as early as 1869 by Engineer W. J. du Port of the Tanjong Pagar Dock Company, but they only built a short length of track which came into use in 1877. The project was approved by Governor Charles Bullen Hugh Mitchell only in 1899 after then Governor Cecil Clementi Smith raised the need for it in an 1889 Legislative Council meeting. Construction works were then initiated, with the groundbreaking ceremony held on 16 April 1900. Chinese labour was employed principally.
C. E. Spooner, general manager of the FMSR, was appointed the supervisor of the project. Costing a total of $1,967,495, the Singapore-Kranji Railway (Singapore Government Railway) Line, running from Singapore to Kranji, was completed in 1903. Opened in two phases, the first section was launched on 1 January 1903. It stretched from Singapore to Bukit Timah and consisted of four stations along the line: Singapore, Newton, Cluny and Bukit Timah. According to a newspaper report the following day, “a total of 557½ passengers were carried” on the opening day. The second section, which extended the line to Woodlands, was completed three months later when the Woodlands station was opened on 10 April 1903. In 1903, there were a total of 426,044 passengers. By 1905, this had increased to 525,553.
Soon after, work began on the extension of the railway line from a point near Tank Road where a new through station was built in 1906/7 to the wharves at Pasir Panjang. The extension was completed and opened on 21 January 1907. With the extension, the stations along the line were Woodlands, Mandai, Bukit Panjang, Bukit Timah, Holland, Cluny, Newton, Tank Road, Borneo Wharf and Pasir Panjang. The old Singapore Station was converted for use as a goods depot and plans to extend this line along Boat Quay to Anderson Bridge in the 1920s came to nothing.
For several years, the railway line operated two boats named Singapore and Johore which ferried railway passengers across the Johor Straits to visit the gambling dens in Johore. When the Johore Railway opened in 1909 these ferries carried railway passengers for connecting trains. With the completion of Causeway in 1923 a connection was made with the Johore Railway. Lodging flats known as the Kelantan flats in Kampong Bahru Road were built by the Keretapi Tanah Melayu and provided accommodation for the Malaysian Railwayand Malaysian Customs. The Tank Road-Bukit Panjang line was dismantled after the completion of the line to Tanjong Pagar on a new alignment via a new Bukit Timah station.
The Admiralty Military Railway was a line that branched off the main line near Woodlands and was built in the 1930s to serve the Naval Shipyard at Sembawang. Three of the locomotives were 0-6-0Ts built by Hunslet in 1929 and numbered SL18-20. In November 1941 they were transferred to the FMSR as the second Class A, later becoming 331 class before being sold to the Port Of Singapore in 1946. In addition to the metre gauge line there was a standard gauge system and two of the locomotives which operated this system were returned to the UK in 1955. One of these, Hawthorn Leslie 3865 of 1936, an 0-4-0ST named "Singapore", has been preserved. This line was closed in 1959.
The Changi Military Railway was a 4-mile long standard gauge line built by the FMSR for the War Department, for the protection of Singapore's new Naval Base at Sembawang. The fortifications for the Naval Base were laid at the entrance to the Old Strait, at Changi, where one 15-inch gun, one 9-inch battery, one 6-inch battery and search lights were installed. The artillery installations were supplied with underground ammunition depots and loaded with armour piercing shells. On the beach, concrete machine emplacements and wire were installed. Airfields in Sembawang, Seletar and Tengah were to provide air cover for the Base. Bagnalls of Stafford supplied an 0-6-0ST, number 2547 of 6/1936, to the War Office department, Changi, Singapore. It had 16" x 22" cylinders and 3' 4" driving wheels. It was last seen derelict in 1947 but its fate is unknown. The railway ran from Fairy Point pier to the battery with a short branch to a depot. Further details are available from the Industrial Railway Society.
Other sidings involve the two branched off the main line between Tanjong Pagar and Tanglin Halt, the exchange sidings for the latter being adjacent to Tanglin halt. These were served by two Avonside Engine Company 0-6-0STs, 2030/1929 SL7 (yard No 144) and 2031/1929 SL8 (yard No 145), and a Bagnall 0-4-0ST 2770 of 4/1944, yard No 1729. Whenever these locomotives moved between depots they had to use the main line and a token had to be obtained from either Tanjong Pagar or Bukit Timah and returned promptly by road after the movement. A third line branched off south of Bukit Timah, near Jalan Jelita, ran westwards, then turned north and crossed Ulu Pandan Road and entered a depot at Buona Vista Battery (see map on Singapore Railway history page). There was a fourth siding to the ammunition depot at Kranji, closed in 1959 - I am not sure if this is the same siding which later served a Shell depot at Kranji. The line from Tanglin exchange sidings ran south and then west, crossing Portsdown road near a school and ending up in the military complex adjacent to Ayer Rajah road near the junctions with North and South Buona Vista roads. Details of locomotives can be found here. Part of the Ayer Rajah parts were later redeveloped into the new industrial park at Ayer Rajah in 1989.
The Sir John Jackson contract was to build the Naval Base at Sembawang and a large number of locomotives of both metre gauge and standard gauge were required. The construction required a huge quantity of granite blocks which were quarried from mountains in south Johore and shipped by rail down to the coast opposite Sembawang for loading into barges.
On 4 March 1966, the 19 km line from Bukit Timah to Jurong Port Road via the Jurong railway station, and Teban Gardens was officially built, this was a joint venture between the KTM and Economic Development Board. This has been closed down in 1986.
The Singapore railway is typical of British colonial railway systems, built to the metre gauge (3 ft 3⅜ in). Singapore had KTM's only hydraulic buffer stops developed by Ransomes & Rapier, a British manufacturer of railway equipment. The Singapore station was also one of three major signal cabins along the West Coast Line until 1967, when a new station was opened in Butterworth, Penang. Singapore's Tanjong Pagar station was also only one of three stations with hotels, the other two being Ipoh and Kuala Lumpur.
The railway track in Singapore ran along the current Cuppage Road, along the Monk's Hill Road and toward a station at Newton on Gilthead Road close to where the Newton Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) Station now stands. The tracks travels towards the Bukit Timah Road, with a stop at Cluny Road and Bukit Timah before passing through the Bukit Timah village to Kranji and Woodlands. An extension for goods trains was opened in 1907. This connected Tank Road Station to the dockyard in Pasir Panjang, via the People's Park area. There would be slowdowns at Bukit Timah and Kranji for manual exchange of tokens.
In 1970s, the electrification and double tracking was planned by the Singapore government to facilitate growth in public transit, and with the new commuter rail line, more new stations will be added and Metro-Cammell commuter rail trains will then be purchased similar to those in Hong Kong. One consequence is that whereas much of the track that is in the Malaysian railway is unfenced, with footpaths or roads alongside major villages, the faster, quieter and more efficient railway requires the complete fencing of the railway from Woodlands to Tanjong Pagar, necessitating the construction of footbridges with both steps and sloping ramps at various village locations. A study from Harvard University had denoted stations such as Lower Delta, Alexandra, Buona Vista, Bukit Timah, Upper Bukit Timah, Bukit Panjang, Mandai West, Kranji and Woodlands Checkpoint with a possible extension to Jurong East and Tampines via the reclaimed land of East Coast. However, the idea was scrapped by 1990 as it was expensive to justify the idea and the two governments in Singapore and Malaysia wanted to move the railway station over to Woodlands Train Checkpoint, which was achieved on 1 July 2011. The section between Bukit Panjang and Bukit Timah Railway Station duplicates the Downtown Line Stage 2, which was opened on 27 December 2015.
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