Professor Li was struck by an Admiralty-bound East Rail Line train at Kowloon Tong yesterday lunchtime
Updated 4:10pm 26 August 2024. The original version of this story published 8:34am on 26 August 2024 had many issues stemming from potentially false and even fraudulent information from a previously trusted source. We regret the errors.
A CityU professor was killed under a train at Kowloon Tong station yesterday just hours after safety barriers had been completed on the other side of the platform.
Authorities say Li had jumped onto the southbound rails in front of an Admiralty-bound East Rail Line train. Police said a suicide note had been found at the scene after 59-year-old Professor Li Hin-wa with the Department of Architecture and Civil Engineering at CityU, was declared dead at the scene.
Tragically, that southbound platform of the East Rail Line at Kowloon Tong is one of the last East Rail Line platforms yet to be fitted with any safety gates: in fact, the last pair of gates on the northbound platform was completed just the night before Li’s death.
The northbound safety gate installation at Kowloon Tong was only finished the night before Li’s death: the southbound platform where Li died has no safety gates at all
The platform gate project, which aimed to improve safety and prevent accidents and suicides on the railway, has installed safety gates at nine other stations, with only Kowloon Tong southbound, Lo Wu, University and Mong Kok East without.
While direct statistics are not available, a search of police reports indicates around 30 “falling onto the railway track” or suicide attempts on the railway network in the last 18 months. At least nine on the East Rail Line were fatal, with a third of those at Kowloon Tong. Accurate tallies are not available from MTR or authorities.
Deaths on the East Rail Line since December 2022 (source: police records, this list may be incomplete due to different police classifications of death by rail)
Those included a 13-year-old girl in April 2024, at Sheung Shui, and two deaths on one Sunday in October 2023: a 67-year-old man and a 20-year-old woman.
After those deaths, lawmaker Michael Tien criticized the progress of the safety gate project. “Since the opening of the East Rail line’s cross-harbour section [in May 2022], the MTR Corp has hardly done anything. There have been constant delays, accidents one after another that have cost lives,” he told South China Morning Post at the time.
MTR says the project is complicated, requiring platform strengthening for each pair of 45 gates serving each platform. One pair of gates weighs half a tonne, it says, and work can only be carried out in the “golden hours” of no train service between 2 and 4am.
There were 2,166 “reportable events” on the MTR network in 2023, up 10% on 2022 and a record ten-year-high. Reportable events include any which must be reported to the authorities, ranging from suicides/attempted suicides to trespassing on tracks and accidents on escalators, lifts and moving pathways.
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