Abuja-Kaduna Railway Service Resumes Next Week – FG

The federal government has announced that the Abuja-Kaduna railway train service will resume July 29th, 2020.

This was revealed by the Minister of Transportation, Rotimi Amaechi on Saturday.

The Minister said this during the inspection and test running of 10 new coaches and 2 locomotives. The test run was on the Abuja-Kaduna railway project. He further explained that they are trying to resume the railway service before the Sallah celebration.

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On the hike of train fare, Amaechi said President Muhammadu Buhari has approved the reviewed fares. With the approval, Economy will now be N3,000 while the Business class will be N6,000.

On the commercial activities of train service from Itakpe to Warri, he explained that the axis is more lucrative than the Abuja-Kaduna. This is because, by the time the Nweke project starts, they will have to be conveying the pipes from Warri seaport to Itakpe. However,  in terms of passenger burden, they would have moved from 3,000 passengers per day to 4,500 passengers per day.

On the Lagos railway project, the Minister said they need about 1000 workers to work on Ebutte Metta station. But presently, they are only working with 10 workers.

“The two things we can do is to either run skeletal services and be running 2 services, one going and one coming that means they will be using the double tracks but they won’t be using the stations.

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“If they have to use the stations, nobody should complain that they are uncompleted stations but we will only do that if there is heavy pressure on traffic, if not they may have to wait till the stations are ready.

“We had targeted May this year and they were working towards May but unfortunately Covid-19 came, so we told them to complete the small stations because that one is easy for 10 persons.

“We need the biggest station in Ebute Metta and they will need about 1000 workers on-site and we don’t want to risk that because of the spread of the virus,” he said.