The trial run on Monday of the Nhon-Hanoi Station metro line, scheduled to be the second of its kind in Hanoi, showed maximum operational efficiency, the Hanoi Metropolitan Railway Management Board (MRB) said on Tuesday.

This is part of a test run taking place in two phases, with the first evaluating the line’s Reliability, Availability, Maintainability and Safety (RAMS).

During the first phase, four trains will run on the 8.5-kilometer elevated section from Nhon Depot to S8 Station between 9:00 am and 7:00 pm on weekends and all eight trains run during the same time frame on weekdays.

Each train stops at a station for about 20 seconds.

The entire time it takes for a train to run between two ends should be around 16 minutes, meaning a round trip takes 32 minutes.

If the efficiency recorded during the first five consecutive days of trial runs fails to reach 98 percent, the phase will be extended until the goal is achieved, to a maximum of six weeks.

The second phase of the test run will commence right after the RAMS evaluation is completed, with several scenarios being simulated, such as blackouts and fires.

The Nhon-Hanoi Railway Station metro line, the second route to be put into operation after Cat Linh-Ha Dong in the capital city, is slated to run 12.5 kilometers from Nhon in Nam Tu Liem District to the Hanoi Railway Station in the downtown area.

It will include 8.5 kilometers on elevated tracks and four kilometers underground.

Construction began in 2010 at an estimated cost of EUR783 million (US$820.3 million), which was then revised up to EUR1.1 billion ($1.15 billion) in 2014 and is mainly funded by official development assistance (ODA) from France.

It was originally expected to be finished in 2018.

However, a report by MRB showed that only 75 percent was completed, the Vietnam News Agency reported in October.

Its first train was put on a trial run in January last year.

The metro route is anticipated to help reduce 20,000 metric tons of vehicle exhaust in Hanoi each year.

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