The MTR Turns 45: What’s Left of the KCR?

There’s a treasure trove of MTR history hidden in a discreet corner of Hung Hom Station. To access the Station Rail Voyage exhibition, you need to first register online for a free visit, then make your way past fast-food kiosks and a waiting area for the slow train to China. Then you’ll discover decades of artefacts from Hong Kong’s renowned metro system: maps, posters, control panels, even decommissioned trains that you can board for a journey back in time.

Except most of what’s on display isn’t really about the MTR: they’re relics from Hong Kong’s other metro system, the KCR, which ceased to exist in 2007 after 97 years of operation. Everything that was once part of the historic Kowloon-Canton Railway has been folded into the MTR. But its history is integral to the story of public transport in Hong Kong – and if you know where to look, you can still find traces of the KCR hidden inside the MTR today.

We’ve already written about the early history of the KCR, which opened in 1910 as a steam-powered locomotive linking Kowloon and Guangzhou. When China’s borders were sealed shut after the Communist Party came to power in 1949, the KCR functioned as a single-track commuter railway for the rural communities of the New Territories, with about 32 trips per day, infrequent enough for village kids to spend their time playing on the tracks. But with the steady development of the New Territories after the 1970s, the KCR was double-tracked and electrified to offer frequent service to the quickly-growing residential and industrial areas like Sha Tin and Fo Tan.

The newly modernised KCR opened in 1982, three years after Hong Kong’s first MTR line. And for the next two decades, rapid transit in Hong Kong would be offered by two separate companies, both owned by the government, with the MTR serving the urban areas of Kowloon and Hong Kong Island and the KCR focused on the vast expanse of the New Territories, plus a few stations in Kowloon.

In the beginning, there was just one KCR line: what is now referred to as the East Rail Line. It was colloquially called the fo2 ce1 (火車), which means railway, though it can be literally translated to “fire vehicle.” This distinguished it from the dei6 tit3 (地鐵), the MTR, whose name literally means “earth iron” but is simply the word for a subway or metro. But they stood apart in most other ways, too. Whereas MTR carriages were configured for large crowds, with bench seating and plenty of standing room, the KCR’s first electric trains had rows of seats in a two-by-three configuration, more typical of a suburban or intercity railway than a metro. The lower passenger capacity per carriage was compensated by extra length: 12 cars compared to six for the MTR, including a first-class car that offered more comfortable seats.

KCR stations lacked the visual pizzazz that MTR chief architect Roland Paoletti had given his system’s interior spaces, but it still had a distinctive visual identity. Before World War II, the KCR’s logo had simply been the Hong Kong coat of arms reproduced on a seal with the words “Kowloon-Canton Railway — British Section.” That was replaced by a vaguely Art Deco rendition of the letters KCR between 1945 and 1949, followed by a bilingual version that was used until 1975, at which point the logo became a groovy rendition of the character 九 (gau2, “nine,” for Kowloon). That lasted until the KCR’s modernisation, which came with an entirely new graphic mark with two arrows pointing outwards, linked by an italicised equals sign. It’s not clear who designed this logo, but it brings to mind the British Rail double arrow logo designed by Gerry Barney in 1965.

The KCR’s double arrow was used until 1996, when it was ever so slightly tweaked by turning the equals sign into a single line. The same year, the rail company commissioned British font foundry Dalton Maag to create a custom sans-serif typeface called Casey, whose name was derived from the first two letters of the KCR’s acronym. 

By then, the KCR had expanded well beyond the original railway running up to the Chinese border. In 1984, the rail company began planning and building the light rail system that would serve Yuen Long and Tuen Mun, which opened in 1988. In 1996, the KCR won a bid to build a new railway linking Kowloon to the northwestern New Territories; it opened in 2003 as the KCR West Rail. It was soon followed by another line, the Ma On Shan Rail, which opened on the east side of the Shing Mun River in 2004. 

The new stations built by the KCR were decidedly larger than those being built by the MTR around the same time; the mentality of running a commuter rail rather than a high-frequency metro system seemed deeply ingrained at the KCR, even if the level of service was comparable to the MTR. “There’s a generosity of space that was not reflected in the MTR stations,” says Andrew Mead, who served as the MTR’s chief architect from 2013 to 2025. Cavernous platforms gave way to remarkably spacious platforms. Each station had toilets, unlike the MTR. 

In 2005, the KCR had 34 stations and its trains carried 1.5 million passengers every day. By contrast, the MTR at the time had 50 stations and it served 2.81 million daily passengers. The KCR was less profitable and it also had very little involvement in real estate, unlike the MTR, which had very successfully worked with developers to transform the property around its stations into lucrative shopping malls and private housing estates. Hoping to bring some of the MTR’s money-making magic to the KCR, the Hong Kong government officially encouraged the two companies to merge in 2004, and in 2006 unveiled the details of the merger. The KCR wouldn’t cease to exist, but it would grant a renewable 50-year concession to the MTR to operate its railways, light rail and bus lines. The merger was formalised on December 2, 2007.

Since then, the KCR’s identity has gradually faded from view. The company’s logo was quickly replaced by that of the MTR, although traces of the old double arrow can still be seen on some trains running along the former West Rail and Ma On Shan Rail, which have now been combined to create the MTR’s Tuen Ma Line. Wayfinding in Casey gave way to the Myriad Pro font used by the MTR; station names in former KCR stations are now written in the distinctive MTR Song script pioneered by Sammy Or. Even the expression “fo2 ce1” is used less and less to refer to the former KCR. 

But the legacy of the KCR still lingers like a ghost. Casey was adapted to become a font called Stroudley, which is used for wayfinding in the Singapore MRT, Changi Airport and the St Pancras railway station in London. Here in Hong Kong, there are traces of the KCR that are invisible to ordinary passengers, notably how the former KCR trackage still isn’t integrated with that of the MTR, as they use incompatible track gauges and voltage. There are also more obvious remnants, like fact that the East Rail Line still has a first-class carriage. And in at least one way the spirit of the KCR has pervaded the rest of the MTR system: after resisting for many years to add toilets to its stations, the MTR began including them in stations built after 2014, and it has since retrofitted the majority of its stations to include toilets. 

And of course, there is now Station Rail Voyage. It opened in April 2024 and was only meant to last until the end of the year, but after drawing more than 70,000 visitors in its first eight months, the MTR decided to extend the exhibition until at least the end of 2025. After passing through an eclectic mix of paraphernalia from both the MTR and KCR’s histories, visitors can ride an escalator down to a disused set of tracks where vintage KCR trains await. 

The padded first-class seats are roped off, but you can sit in one of the hard plastic ordinary-class seats, or stand and grip the distinctive spherical handles that dangle from the ceiling. Close your eyes, imagine the old KCR announcements and pretend you’re on your way to Sheung Shui: a brief memory of a past life.