NRC to start Sunday operations on the Lagos-Ibadan rail line

The Nigerian Railway Corporation (NRC) has said that it will soon add Sunday trips on the Lagos-Ibadan standard gauge rail services to satisfy customers.

This disclosure was made by the Managing Director of NRC, Mr Fidet Okhiria, during a 2-day retreat for senior management of the corporation on Thursday, June 24, 2021, in Lagos, according to the News Agency of Nigeria.

What the Managing Director of NRC is saying

Okhiria in his statement said, “We are working to include Sunday service in our operations. In the next two weeks, Sunday service will commence but we need to service the rolling stock fully before programming the train for seven days of operation.

We want Nigerians to really enjoy the train service. If not for the servicing, the Sunday service would have commenced this Sunday, June 27. We are also using few days to programme staff for night operations because we want people to benefit from the train services.

The objective of the management staff meeting is to review and inform them on the way forward. Before now, we have given ourselves some goals to achieve like how many locomotives, how many speed limit we should remove and how many trains we should have running.’’

Okhiria said there were five-speed restrictions on Abuja/Kaduna Standard gauge railway routes, adding that two-speed restrictions had been removed on that axis due to some ballast formation.

He said they had to put speed restrictions on the Apapa track due to frequent derail because of lack of ballast.

In case you missed it

It can be recalled that President Muhammadu Buhari, about 2 weeks ago, commissioned the $1.5 billion 157 kilometre Lagos-Ibadan railway line after facing several delays.

The corporation later announced that it will commence full commercial operations of the standard gauge railway service from Lagos to Ibadan on Tuesday, June 15, 2021.