The 10 weirdest stations of the Singapore MRT

Most MRT stations are built to the same tidy template: white tiles, platform screen doors, a mall entrance somewhere near exit A. A handful break the pattern for reasons that range from an architecture prize to a cancelled housing project. These ten are the ones locals bring up when someone asks what is actually odd about the network. Full list of stations at dailymetro.live/singapore/explore.

A few of them you have probably ridden through without noticing anything was wrong. That is usually the point.

1. Bukit Brown, the station nobody has ever used

Bukit Brown, station code CC18 on the Circle Line, was built during the line's original construction with the platforms, tunnels and vent shafts all in place. It has never opened. The land above it was, and still is, considered too undeveloped to justify running trains through with the doors open, so the shell sits sealed between Caldecott and Botanic Gardens, complete and unused.

2. Woodleigh, closed for eight years after it was finished

Woodleigh, on the North East Line, was structurally complete in 2003, the same year the line opened. It did not open to the public until 20 June 2011. The area around it had not been built up enough to justify the running costs, so authorities kept it shut for eight years, reversing the decision only after nearby residents petitioned for it and a school opened next door.

3. Bencoolen's canyon walls and maroon lift

Bencoolen, the network's deepest station at 43 metres, had to fit into a site only 22 metres wide. The designers leaned into the constraint: the concourse walls curve like canyon rock in earth tones meant to suggest soil strata, and the lift glass is tinted maroon on purpose, to read as a descent toward the earth's core. It is a strange amount of theatre for a station most people pass through on the way to art school.

4. Bras Basah, where the roof is a pool

Bras Basah, also on the Circle Line, put a shallow reflecting pool directly on top of its concourse, functioning as both the station roof and its main skylight. Stand underground and look up: the light moving across the ceiling is sunlight passing through water. It won the design an award at the 2009 World Architecture Festival, and it still doubles as a quiet feature of the streetscape above.

5. Dhoby Ghaut, named after a vanished laundry

The busiest interchange on the network sits five storeys underground and is named for something that has not existed for a century: dhobi is Hindi for washerman, ghat for a set of steps by a river, describing the open-air laundry that once worked a stream through the area. You are standing under where people beat clothes on stone, connected now by a 55-metre travelator instead.

6. one-north, the only lowercase station

one-north, on the Circle Line, keeps the lowercase styling of the business district above it rather than following the MRT's usual capitalised names. It is a small thing, but it is the only station on the network where the official name will not autocapitalize correctly if you type it without thinking.

7. Marina South Pier, built for a boat more than a neighbourhood

The southern end of the North-South Line exists mainly to connect to a ferry terminal and cruise centre, in an area still mostly reserved land. In June 2024 the operator logged only 2,178 boardings a day there, among the lowest of any station, which makes the platform feel closer to a private dock than a city terminus.

8. Tanjong Pagar, the ghost terminus next door

This one is not technically part of the MRT: the old Tanjong Pagar railway station, a few minutes' walk from the MRT stop of the same name on the East-West Line, was the Malaysian railway's Singapore terminus until it closed on 1 July 2011, when services moved north to the Woodlands Train Checkpoint. Gazetted a national monument, the art deco building still stands empty, tracks and all, and current redevelopment plans link it to the new Cantonment station a short walk away.

9. Gul Circle and the Tuas stations, at the industrial edge of the map

Follow the East-West Line west past Joo Koon and the neighbourhoods disappear: Gul Circle, Tuas Crescent, Tuas West Road and Tuas Link run through Singapore's westernmost industrial belt, past shipyards, oil terminals and container depots, ending a stone's throw from the checkpoint into Malaysia. It is the same network that serves the CBD, on a completely different kind of street.

10. Stadium, built for one building

Stadium, on the Circle Line, exists to serve the National Stadium and the wider Kallang Sports Hub above it. On a big match or concert night it moves a crowd; on an ordinary Tuesday it is one of the calmer platforms on the line, built for a capacity it only needs a few nights a year.