Nigerian Government through the Minister of Transportation, Rotimi Amaechi has revealed that the Abuja-Kaduna Railway Train Service will resume July 29th, 2020.
The Minister said this Saturday during the inspection and test running of 10 new coaches and 2 locomotives of the Abuja-Kaduna railway project further explained that they are trying to resume the railway service before the Sallah celebration.
On the hike of train fare, Amaechi said President Muhammadu Buhari has approved the reviewed fares of Economy to N3,000 while the Business class to 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 because by the time the Nweke project starts, they will have to be conveying the pipes from Warri seaport to Itakpe but 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 and 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.
“If they have to use the stations nobody should complain that they are uncompleted stations but we will only do that if there are 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 10persons.
“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 spread of the virus,” he said.
