The MTR Turns 45: How It All Began

Can you imagine Hong Kong without the MTR?

As the city’s renowned rapid transit system celebrates its 45th anniversary this month, it’s hard to conceive of a Hong Kong without it. Since the very first line opened from Kwun Tong to Shek Kip Mei on Monday, October 1, 1979, the MTR has become seamlessly integrated into Hong Kong’s daily life, moving 4.6 million passengers every day – almost a million more than either the New York City Subway or the London Underground, two much larger systems serving more populous cities. And it does so with remarkable frequency and efficiency. 

“The system has an international reputation for being possibly the highest quality rapid transit system in existence,” raved transport commentator Reece Martin in a YouTube video on the topic.

It’s easy to take that for granted. But one need only look at all of the big cities around the world with underdeveloped transit systems to understand that the success of the MTR — and especially the way it has become so tightly woven into Hong Kong life — was not preordained. So how exactly did we get such a great metro system?

The story begins in the 1960s. Hong Kong was bursting at the seams thanks to a constant influx of migrants fleeing economic hardship and political persecution in mainland China. The city’s population had increased more than six-fold over the previous 20 years, from 600,000 to 3.7 million, but its transportation infrastructure had barely changed. Trams rattled their way across Hong Kong Island through streets clogged with buses and a growing number of cars. Crossing the harbour to Kowloon meant taking a ferry – or if you missed the last sailing, a late-night walla-walla. Getting to the New Territories was a slow-going ordeal that took the better part of a day, and once you got there, the best option to get around was often a “lorry bus,” with passengers crammed cheek-by-jowl in a vehicle meant to carry cargo, not people.

The MTR’s original 1979 map showing the Kwun Tong Line

For many people in Hong Kong, it seemed obvious that the growing, densely-packed city would need an underground railway. The point was raised publicly in 1961 by Kenneth Watson, a Singapore-born British businessman who served on the Legislative Council, and growing public pressure led Hong Kong’s colonial government to commission a British engineering firm, Freeman, Fox, Wilbur Smith and Associates, to propose a way to improve public transport. They started their study in 1966 by analysing the existing situation. At the time, they noted, 75 percent of all trips in Hong Kong were made by public transport: 50 percent by bus, 14 percent by ferry, 11 percent by tram and one percent on the Kowloon-Canton Railway, which at the time was still powered by steam locomotives. The remainder was a mix of personal cars, lorries, private minibuses and taxis both legal and illegal. 

The engineers observed some peculiarities of Hong Kong’s travel patterns. “One feature of public transport in Hong Kong which contributes to its high profitability and low fares, is that riding is spread much more uniformly over the hours of the day, days of the week and months of the year than in most other cities,” they wrote. Then, as now, Hong Kong was perpetually restless – a city on the move. And in a city with so much activity squeezed into a very limited land area, “the travel needs of Hong Kong cannot continue to be wholly served by surface transport.” Instead, it needed a metro. 

Freeman, Fox, Wilbur Smith and Associates published their report in 1967. Their vision was ambitious. They recommended an 64-kilometre rapid transit system with 50 stations along four lines: the Kwun Tong Line, which would connect Yau Tong with the Western Market; the Tsuen Wan Line, from Admiralty to Tsuen Wan; the Island Line from Kennedy Town to Chai Wan; and the Sha Tin Line, from Tsim Sha Tsui to Sha Tin, via To Kwa Wan. This system would serve nearly all of the urban areas of Hong Kong Island and Kowloon, and neighbourhoods outside of walking distance to a station would be served by “a complex system of bus routes” that would connect to the new metro.

That particular system would never be built. The 1967 report sat on a shelf for years, although public pressure remained. Transport experts warned that Hong Kong would “face potentially devastating effects on its economy,” according to a 1968 article in the South China Morning Post. In 1970, the government asked Freeman, Fox, Wilbur Smith and Associates to have another go at their proposal. The engineers presented a new scenario that did not extend to Sha Tin, with the Kwun Tong and Tsuen Wan lines terminating at Mong Kok, where passengers heading to the island would need to transfer to the amusingly named Kong Kow Line. 

But this plan was also shelved. “It was well understood that the project was most unlikely to be given the go-ahead for at least two years,” recalls engineer Colin Coulson in a memoir published in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong Branch. “The reason for this was that Sir John Cowperthwaite was then the Financial Secretary to the Hong Kong Government. He made it known that he considered the project a waste of money.” 

Cowperthwaite had been in his position since 1961, serving under governors Robert Black and David Trench. He was committed to the laissez-faire approach that had defined Britain’s approach to Hong Kong for most of its history as a colony; in his view, the government’s role was to do as little as possible. While that allowed Hong Kong’s economy to thrive, thanks to low taxes and lax regulation, it also led to the inequality that was one of the factors behind the riots in 1966 and 1967. Cowperthwaite was militantly opposed to compulsory public education and he steadfastly opposed a metro system for the same reason: he didn’t think it was the government’s job to take care of people. 

But Hong Kong’s traffic was growing worse by the year – and Cowperthwaite was set to retire. Knowing that the political winds were changing, Freeman, Fox, Wilbur Smith and Associates sent Coulson to Hong Kong where he would continue planning a metro. (It was a family affair: his wife, Heather, was a photographer who documented the MTR’s construction.) In 1971, Cowperthwaite stepped down and was replaced as financial secretary by Philip Haddon-Cave who was enthusiastic about the rapid transit proposals. 

“Up to this moment in time all my dealings with Government had been through the Public Works Department highways office and in particular with an enthusiastic engineer, Alan Wilkins, who had the ambiguous title of ‘Government Highway Engineer, Mass Transit,’” writes Coulson. “I spent much time in his office talking about the railway over a coffee and cigar! (Quite normal in 1972).” But everything changed when the newly appointed governor Murray MacLehose gave the mass transit project the official go-ahead. Suddenly, Coulson was dealing not with a mid-ranking government engineer but with a steering committee chaired by Haddon-Cave and populated by high-level civil servants as well as the chairman of HSBC. 

The government invited international consortia to come forward with plans to build the system according to Coulson’s design. Only one submitted a bid: a Japanese consortium led by Mitsubishi that promised to build the system for HK$5 billion, or roughly $51 billion in today’s dollars. “We were instructed to forward our designs to Japan as they were developed to set out what was expected,” writes Coulson. But it eventually became clear that the consortium did not intend to build the system that Coulson knew Hong Kong needed. 

“The Japanese were proposing narrower and shorter trains, shorter stations and many other features we considered unacceptable. What they were proposing would, if built, lead to platform and train overloading from day one,” he writes. “I and my team, often with Haddon-Cave himself, spent many hours in the Mitsubishi conference room in Tokyo trying to persuade them to change their proposals to meet our requirements.”

They refused to budge – but Coulson got his way thanks to the 1974 oil crisis, which sent construction costs soaring and led Mitsubishi to withdraw its bid for the Hong Kong project. With the consortium out of the picture, Coulson managed to convince the steering committee to avoid compromising his plans for 3.2-metre-wide trains with eight cars, which would be able to carry up to 3,200 passengers at a time. At his urging, the government established the Mass Transit Railway Corporation, a government-owned independent agency that would build and operate the new metro system. But it also issued an ultimatum: if the first round of tenders to build the system were too expensive, it would cancel the entire project. 

Coulson recalls a very tense meeting when he and the newly appointed directors of the MTR Corporation received the first tenders. They opened two from European companies, both of which were too expensive. But the next bids came from Japanese companies and both were under the revised HK$5.8 billion budget. “The project was saved,” writes Coulson. 

An original MTR carriage restored for the system’s 45th anniversary. Photo via MTR Corporation

Hong Kong was not alone in building an entirely new metro system. Cities around the world were spending lavishly on new underground railways. The Montreal Metro, which opened in 1966 and was extended throughout the 1970s, had enormous cathedral-like stations, each designed by a different architect. The Washington Metro opened in 1976 with vaulted Brutalist stations designed by architect Harry Weese. San Francisco’s Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system was launched in 1972 with cutting-edge computerised train controls. 

Hong Kong would have none of that. Faced with a tight budget, the MTR’s Modified Initial System was much more modest than what had been proposed in 1967 and 1970. There would be just one line at first, running from Kwun Tong to Central, with the Tsuen Wan Line and Island Line added later if things went well. Whereas other cities were building “civic palaces,” as the MTR’s current chief architect Andrew Mead describes them, Hong Kong’s first stations were decidedly utilitarian. The MTR’s first chief architect, Roland Paoletti — who would later oversee the design of London’s Jubilee Line — was limited to creating distinctive mosaic tile finishes for stations that were mostly identical. “There’s not much architecture to those early stations,” says Mead. (Paoletti was able to flex his architectural muscle in designing the system’s ventilation shafts, however, which Mead says are often remarkable in their form and colours.)

But the lack of flash is also part of what makes the MTR such a successful system. BART’s innovative train controls turned out to be so buggy that it took years for the railway to provide full service. “The concept of a ‘space age’ system full of new technology was not for us,” writes Coulson. “We required that the trains would not include any components that had not had at least five years’ proven service.” (It’s worth noting that the MTR has aged much better than many of its counterparts from the same era, which are struggling with years of deferred maintenance.)

The MTR opened under budget and two months ahead of schedule with a celebratory breakfast of caviar and Champagne. Murray MacLehose drove the first train through a red banner. Drivers had been trained on the London Underground and in a rail simulator at MTR headquarters. Everything went smoothly, thanks to Coulson’s savvy decision to avoid any unproven technology, although the crush of 230,000 people who besieged the railway on its first day of operations tested the durability of the automatic ticket machines, some of which failed.

The legacy of the MTR is hard to overstate. “The foresight was amazing,” says Andrew Mead. In the past 45 years, Hong Kong has become what is arguably the most transit-oriented city on earth, with 88 percent of the population getting around by public transport, compared to 47 percent in Tokyo, 33 percent in New York and 29 percent in London. And it all started with an engineer’s report in the 1960s – and a few visionary people.