I meant what I said, but I only said it because it was hot, and I forgot to pray.
That, in essence, was the somewhat strange response from Frederick Ma this morning after the MTR chief copped flak over the weekend for saying there was no need to give the public more details about the future cross-border express rail line.
Speaking on Saturday, the MTR chairman had dismissed the public’s need to know about the controversial project, which has experienced technical issues and been long steeped in controversy regarding plans to station mainland immigration officers in Hong Kong.
According to RTHK, Ma had said it was “pointless” to release more details about the project because the media and public were “not rail experts.” He urged people to “trust” the experts and not to worry.
But after the remarks drew criticism, Ma appeared today on a radio program to, um, explain … kind of.
According to RTHK, he said that, though he stood by the comments, he made them because “maybe the weather was too hot” and “maybe he didn’t pray on that morning.”
Hard to argue with that sort of logic.
The high-speed train connection with the sprawling southern Chinese cities of Shenzhen and Guangzhou is due to open in September, but has long faced opposition over plans to allow immigration officers from China to enforce mainland law at a joint-checkpoint in West Kowloon.
Meanwhile, the line itself has experienced some issues, including last month when a train partially derailed after a test run.
According to RTHK, the MTR’s operations chief, Francis Li, said today that a design consultant was to blame for the fault in the track that led to four wheels of the final carriage of one train slipping off the rails after it returned to the depot in Shek Kong.
More recently, a section of the line’s signaling system was affected by underground water leaks, something rail operator MTR Corporation admitted was partly beyond their control, the SCMP reported.
