Over here at Naijauto.com, we have been noticing and putting out a few reports on the current passengers’ upsurge and rising problems of standing in the trains when travelling by rail these days in Nigeria.
It’s kind of interesting to see that the Nigerian government has been able to quickly spot this problem and started making moves to curb it at the early stage now.
The Nigerian Federal government has ordered that two new coaches should be added for the Abuja-Kaduna rail service in order to solve the current problem of passengers’ upsurge. This order was unveiled at Ologueru, Ibadan by the Minister of Transportation, Mr Rotimi Amaechi, during his monthly inspection of the Lagos-Ibadan rail line which is in progress.
Anyone that has been following our recent traffic updates would recall that due to the sudden rise in kidnappings and criminal activities along the renowned Abuja-Kaduna road, travellers now prefer to travel by rail. This is the major cause of the upsurge being noticed on the Abuja-Kaduna train service.
Mr Rotimi Amaechi claims that we should expect 2 additional coaches for the Abuja-Kaduna rail soon
Mr Rotimi Amaechi said that two additional coaches will be moved by the Nigerian Railway Corporation from Itakpe-Warri lines to the Abuja-Kaduna route. He also went further to warn against tickets racketeering by the rail service officials which he promised serious actions of prosecution will be levelled against anyone caught in those illegal acts. His words were;
"We are going there to arrest anyone caught up with tickets racketeering. The long queue at that axis is because coaches are not enough.
“The reason we bought those coaches was for people to sit down. But people are standing, they shouldn’t stand. But I have directed that we should move two coaches from Itakpe-Warri to Kaduna-Abuja. Today is the first day that I will be giving this directive.
“The first directive I gave was to move two coaches from Itakpe-Warri to Lagos. When we saw the problem today, I told the MD, to move two coaches to Kaduna from Itakpe-Warri because there are no much passengers in that axis,”
Increased rate of Kidnappings along the Abuja-Kaduna road has led to a serious passengers’ upsurge at train service stations
With all these efforts, promises, and various actions will anyone be right to say that our Minister for transportation is really working?
Even though he is showing a lot of concerns and plans right now, no one could really be sure if the presidency is ready to give him full support on all his plans and ambitions. We have not seen many new things being done so far as regards the rail transport sector in Nigeria under this current administration.
There is just only a plethora of unfinished projects and non-functional installations all around the country. But we will still hold on to the words of Mr Rotimi Amaechi and see how things go with time.
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