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Beijing Subway Line 8 has been temporarily closed. The current four-station line runs from Beitucheng through the Olympic Green to

South Gate of Forest Park. Don't panic, the reason for the closure is the impending opening of Line 8, phase 2! The second phase, scheduled to open in late December, will extend the line to the north, with additional interchanges with the Changping Line and Line 13. The full list of new stations is listed below.

• Zhuxinzhuang 朱辛庄 (Changping Line)
• Pingxifu 平西府
• Huoying 霍营 (Line 13)
• Xisanqi 西三旗
• Xisanqi South 西三旗南
• Yongtai 永泰
• Lincui Lu 林萃路
• South Gate of Forest Park 森林公园南门
• Olympic Green 奥林匹克公园
• Olympic Sports Center 奥体中心
• Beitucheng 北土城 (Line 10)

The Singapore MRT's Circle Line new extension will open tomorrow, October 8. The new stations extend the line from Marymount to Harbourfront where you can interchange with the North-East Line. There's another new interchange at Buona Vista with the East-West Line.

An update for our Explore Singapore MRT map is now available on the iTunes App Store. It's a free update for all users who have purchased the app in the past! Our online map www.exploresg.com has also been updated with the new stations.

Note this is a beta release - we don't yet have some information for the new stations, such as first/last train times and journey costs. We'll provide a new update as soon as we get this information added.

• Shanghaiist has a good round-up of news after the crash on Shanghai's Metro Line 10. Power failure and human error are said to have caused the crash.
• In Beijing, a new interchange passageway has shortened transfer times at the notoriously slow Xizhimen station
• Singapore's Circle Line will be extended, with the official opening on October 8. We'll blog about the changes to Explore Singapore later in the week.

• Two roads in downtown Shanghai (Qufu Road and Damuqiao Road) close to make way for Line 12 metro construction
• On October 2 you'll be able to take free rides on Singapore's expanded Circle Line. The official opening is October 8.
• Read a review of our iPhone apps on SimonBlog

Happy Mid-Autumn festival to all ExploreMetro fans! Here's a special holiday treat for you metro-lovers. We've made an anagrammed version of the 2011 Shanghai Metro map, scrambling the letters of the English names of all stations for comic effect.

Click below for the full PDF metro map, here are some of our favorites:

• Haha, brainy girls = Shanghai Library
• Huge Shoe healing Communist Ascendancy  = Shanghai Science and Technology Museum
• Mouse came up arse = Aerospace Museum
• Odd anagram = Madang Road

Back in 2008 I created the first anagrammed map of the Shanghai Metro. Since then the Shanghai Metro has added lots of new stations and lines and is now the longest metro system in the world, so I thought it was about time to bring the anagram map up to date!

Note for pedants: I used the common English name of the station as posted on signboards, spelling out directions e.g. South Lingyan Road. For some challenging stations (particularly the ones with lots of Xs and Zs I added "station" e.g. Dongjing Station -> Standing, I jog not.)

The Shanghai Metro company announced that Shanghai Metro Line 2 will have increased service from Thursday 1st September!

More frequent trains!

• On the central part of the line. trains will now run every 3.5 minutes, down from 4 minutes
• On the eastern part of the line, trains between Guanglan Road and Pudong International Airport will run every 8 minutes, down from 9.5 minutes
• On the western part of the line, trains between Songhong Road to East Xujing Station via Hongqiao Airport will run every 6.5 minutes, down from 10 minutes

Longer hours!

• Trains to Pudong International Airport will run for 90 minutes more each day: new service hours are 6am to 10pm.
• Extra trains from Guanglan Road to Yuandong Avenue, running until 10.42pm
• Two extra trains from Hongqiao Railway Station and Hongqiao Airport to Longyang Road, departing at 11.04pm and 11.20pm

We've updated our online metro map with all the latest train times. An update to our Explore Shanghai Metro app for iPhone will be available shortly!

We need your help! We’re planning to add Pinyin names to our metro maps to help you pronounce metro station names more easily. After your great help on the Shanghai names, we need your help to check the accuracy of the Beijing Subway transliterations. Take a look over the list of Beijing Subway stations below, and if you see any errors in the pinyin column, leave us a comment! In particular: * Do all syllables have the correct pinyin, including tone mark? * Are the word boundaries correct? The Beijing Subway tends to run multiple words together in Pinyin. We've tried to use more logical word breaks where possible.

We're working on a useful new feature for our iPhone apps which we think you'll find really useful.

When you tap to hear the audio pronunciation for a station, you'll also see the Pinyin for the station name, complete with tone marks. This is really handy for stations with alternative English names, for example:

People's Square (Rénmín Guǎngchǎng)

Oriental Sports Center (Dōngfāng Tǐyù Zhōngxīn )

We've already added the Pinyin pronunciations to the Shanghai Metropedia pages. We'll be launching the feature for our Shanghai app soon, followed by our other China metro apps.

Helping you get to your destination faster, and learn some Chinese en route :)

CNNgo have published a list of their 10 best apps for living in Shanghai, and Explore Shanghai is ranked #1 :)

Read the full article on CNNgo for the full list