Nigeria Launches Two New Speed Trains For Abuja-Kaduna Route In October

Except for any technical hitches, the Nigerian Railway Corporation (NRC) is expected to launch the two new speed locomotives it acquired for the Abuja-Kaduna standard gauge train service in October.


The trains, which arrived Lagos July 25, 2017 arrived Idu, Abuja on August 13, 2017. The off-loading was completed on August 14, 2017.

Daily Trust gathered that by this week, the handing over of the new locomotives by the CCECC to the NRC management will be complete and training commence immediately, followed by test run before commercial deployment.

Already, the CCECC has commenced technical evaluation of the two new locomotives before handing them over to NRC.

Speaking on this, the NRC Liaison Officer in Abuja, Mr. Pascal A Nnorli, said: “By this week, the locomotives should be fully taken over from the Chinese. Once the NRC takes full possession of the two locomotives, the training of Nigerians who will operate them will commence. The training will be done by technical staff of the CCECC just like they did before the train service was launched.”

Built to travel up to 150km per hour, once deployed, the trains will cut travel time from Abuja-Kaduna from about 2:45 minutes to about 1:30 minutes.

Also, the number of daily train services will increase from the present four.