The records of the Singapore MRT network

The MRT does not have a proper ghost station story, at least not yet: the closest candidates are either sealed shells that never opened or old railway ruins that were never part of the MRT to begin with. What the network does have is a long list of superlatives, deepest, biggest, quietest, oldest, that add up to a decent picture of how it was actually built. Play the network at dailymetro.live/singapore.

Some of these records will not last. A few are already scheduled to be broken by lines still under construction.

The deepest station: Bencoolen, 43 metres down

Bencoolen, on the Downtown Line, sits 43 metres below street level, the deepest station currently in the network. It had to be squeezed into a plot only 22 metres wide, which is why its concourse curves rather than runs straight. The record has an expiry date: the future Cross Island Line is planned to put its Pasir Ris platforms at 47 metres.

The biggest interchange: Dhoby Ghaut, five levels underground

Dhoby Ghaut became the network's first triple-line interchange when the Circle Line platforms opened in 2010, joining the North-South and North East lines. It spans five underground levels, making it the largest station on the MRT, and its North East Line platforms, 28 metres down, held their own depth record until Bras Basah opened in 2010 and went deeper still.

The longest escalator and the fastest ones

Bras Basah holds the record for the network's longest single escalator, 41 metres from the ticket concourse to the transfer level, taking about a minute to ride. More broadly, most of the MRT's heavy-duty escalators run at 0.75 m/s, roughly 50% faster than a conventional escalator, a deliberate choice to keep queues short at stations that sit unusually deep underground.

The oldest line and the newest

The North-South Line is the oldest, opening on 7 November 1987 with an initial stretch of five stations. The Thomson-East Coast Line is the newest, opened in stages through the early 2020s and still the line whose stations carry the most recent opening years in the game's own data.

The quietest station: Marina South Pier

The southern terminus of the North-South Line exists mainly to serve a ferry terminal and cruise centre, and the surrounding land is still largely undeveloped. The operator recorded only 2,178 boardings a day there in June 2024, one of the lowest figures on the network. Note that day-to-day ridership numbers for most other stations are not reliably public at station level, only at line level, which is why this article leans on this single, sourced figure rather than guessing at a busiest or emptiest league table.

The one with the wrong-case name, and the biggest art collection

one-north is the only station whose official name starts with a lowercase letter, following the branding of the district above it. Separately, Art in Transit, launched with the North East Line in 2003, has commissioned over 300 artworks built into roughly 80 stations, making it Singapore's largest public art programme by the operator's own count.