To be fair to Lui Tuck Yew, he inherited the problems from his predecessors namely Mah Bow Tan and Yeo Cheow Tong. Through years of neglect by Mah and Yeo, the problems are now too deep-setted to be rectified within a short span of time.
I know quite a few engineers who were once with either MRTC, LTA and SMRT. According to them, the officers then had been submitting plans after plans for a robust maintenance regime including regular changing of essential parts and systems during Mah and Yeo's time. Unfortunately, their plans were rejected soundly each time or cut down in size and scope with the two ex Transport Ministers blasting them for being too extravagrant.
The final straw was Ho Ching's appointment of Saw Phaik Hwa. In appointing Saw, Ho Ching told her that she was not appointed to drive trains (Saw actually repeated this to reporters at SMRT press conference on her appointment as CEO). Instead she was instructed by Ho Ching to focus on building up the revenue from SMRT's retail outlets. Saw therefore hardly spent any time on the rail operations and the operational staff were largely ignored.This led to mass resignations of operational staff, some of which are the engineers who related all these to me. Saw then start filling up SMRT with her own people from the retail sector and who know nothing about rail operations. Little if at all, was any attention paid to the rail operations, whom Saw thought is self running. All these culminated into what we have today, train failures day after day.
The real culprit is actually none other than Ho Ching. It was she who shifted SMRT focus away from rail operations to retail. It was she who appointed Saw PH, a totally non-technical person to run SMRT. It was she who told her she was not appointed to drive trains, thereby giving her courage to ignore the train operations.
The list of witnesses for the Committe of Inquiry contains all the names connected to the train disruptions, all except for the one, and ironically it is the one who is most responsible. As with all her previous failures such as Temasek's massive losses during the financial crisis (amounting to billions of taxpayers monies), she has immunity.