‘He Didn’t Live To See It’: The Engineer Son Completing His Late Father’s Unfinished Work On LRT3
A Malaysian maintenance engineer marks the opening of the LRT3 Shah Alam line by sharing how he unknowingly completed the unfinished work of his late father, who spent 25 years in the rail industry but never lived to see the line he helped plan enter service.
In the first, a Malaysian engineer stands aboard Vancouver’s SkyTrain in 1997, sent there to learn how to run a driverless rail system that his country was about to build for the first time.
In the second, his son stands aboard a train on the Shah Alam LRT3 line in 2025, doing almost exactly the same thing.
The father never got to see the line open.
Emir Irfan Mohd Zufri, 32, posted both photographs on Threads on Monday (29 June) — the day after the LRT3 officially welcomed its first passengers.
Emir’s father spent 25 years in Malaysia’s rail industry.
He began at the Kelana Jaya Line’s Operations Control Centre as an operations planner, rose to manager, and eventually oversaw the line’s revenue system.
In the final years of his career, he was involved in the early planning stages of what would become the LRT3 — the Shah Alam line connecting Petaling Jaya, Shah Alam and Klang.
He retired in 2021 and never got to see the line enter service, but Emir did.
My late father never got the chance to see LRT3 completed, even though he was involved from the early stages of the project before retiring.
The LRT3 post wasn’t the first time Emir had reached back into his father’s past.
Two months earlier, he had recreated a decades-old photograph of his late father leaning against a flame-airbrushed Mini Cooper — registration BY 1303.
The son had not planned to follow his father into the rail industry.
He studied automotive engineering and only joined the industry in late 2020, starting on the MRT Putrajaya line before moving to the LRT3 project in 2023 — two years after his father retired and the same year his father passed away.
When my father was still around, he would often ask about the LRT3’s progress. It felt like I was reporting back to my bosses every time he asked.
The testing and commissioning phase — the months of painstaking checks before a rail line is cleared to carry passengers — is where both men found themselves in the same frame.
The father did it in Vancouver in 1997, learning the system that would become the Kelana Jaya Line; the son did it on the Shah Alam Line nearly three decades later.
I had to follow the train through various testing and commissioning exercises to understand the system for maintenance. There was a lot to learn.
There always is, and his father knew that too.
Emir is from Shah Alam — the city the line is named after, the city it now serves.
With this change in career, I’m learning new things and doing my best with the team for the people.
