Kuala Lumpur Monorail, Malaysia
Mott MacDonald was appointed as the independent checking engineer for this new mass transit monorail project, which consists of 8.6km of an elevated monorail twin guideway alignment through the central commercial and business district of Kuala Lumpur, eleven stations and one depot complex.

The monorail system provides Kuala Lumpur with an integrated transport network since it has four interchanges with the already existing routes of ‘Putra’ and ‘Star’light rail transits. The interchange at Kuala Lumpur Sentral also links to KTM outer suburban and mainline train services and the ERL ‘Express link’ to Kuala Lumpur International Airport. The Kuala Lumpur monorail also provides a link to the expanding ‘golden triangle’ commercial district of the city centre.

Monorail technology is well proven both in the USA and Japan. The monorail system will be the only one outside of Japan to be used as a regular urban light rail transit system and consequently includes several innovative concepts. The monorail guideway structure consists of elevated guideway beams, which are supported by pillars and built from precast, prestressed and reinforced concrete beams and primarily run above the median of existing roads. The horizontal and vertical alignment requirements of the guideway beams were set when the beams were cast.

Each monorail station consists of 16 spinebeams built from precast, prestressed and reinforced concrete, which form the base of the station. Steel and concrete subassemblies connect to the spinebeams to complete the station. Each of the 12 monorail trains will initially consist of 2-cars, which will be expanded later by the addition of two centre cars to complete a 4-car set. The capacity of each 4-car train is 320 passengers.

The signalling and train control system uses a radio based transmission system and has the capability for full automatic operation. The system has been designed to operate trains at a headway of 150 seconds, which can be upgraded later. The traction power system consists of five sub-stations distributed along the alignment and providing power for the trains at ± 375 V DC distributed to the trains via traction power rails that run on either side of the concrete guideway beam. A maintenance depot at ‘Brickfields’ will perform the maintenance and repair of the monorail trains as well as other electrical and mechanical equipment.

Mott MacDonald’s role involved the monitoring, review, verification and certification of the complete system design, payment milestones and progress of the project to programme, in terms of both the civil and electrical and mechanical railway systems. This role was undertaken from the concept design stage through to civil construction, systems manufacture and installation, integrated testing and commissioning to the final opening.