Metro celebrates anniversary with stoppage

PANAMA’S METRO Line 1 celebrated its third anniversary on Thursday April 6 with its third stoppage in a week.

On Friday  March 31 thousands   of early subway  users had to revert to buses and taxis to get to work 31 due to lack of trains after  maintenance work during the night triggered a security system, and only four trains were able to operate.

On, Wednesday, Apr 5, a braking problem on one of the trains led to another temporary shut  down.

On Thursday , early morning travelers   were again frustrated when technical problems  prevented the start of the service at 5:00 am.

The problems stemmed from the update of the system for  the arrival of the six new trains at the end of the month.

Luis Carlos Diaz, engineer in charge of the operations of the Metro of Panama, said  that when the operation schedule was finished at approximately 11:00 p.m. on Wednesday, “we proceeded to restart the servers to load the new version of the system, but at approximately 2: 00 a.m. a problem appeared in the system and the and  the engineers contacted the company in France  that provides the system  France to eliminate the  fault”

Which was achieved at 5:00 a. m. the official start time for Metro Panama. Services began at 6:00 a.m., making thousands of users once again  late for work or school.

Metro Line 1  transports an average of 270,000 people daily, double the number  predicted in initial projections

The train travels 14 kilometers with 14 stations, in about 21 minutes, with 20 trains of three wagons each.