The Nigerian Railway Corporation (NRC) will introduce train services for both passengers and freight from Port-Harcourt to Aba as well as Lagos to Kano in the first quarter of 2024. The NRC managing director, Fidet Okhaira, highlighted that the NRC will also increase the number of train trips to six on Lagos-Ibadan, Warri-Itakpe, and Abuja-Kaduna railway lines, which means the trips will be three times to and three times for, making six trips in a day. The trips will commence before the second quarter of 2024. Currently, the trains run four trips – two up and two down across the board. However, the turnaround time has been affected by the present situation in the country.
Okhaira explained that the train was meant to operate 24 hours, but due to the security situation in the country, the NRC limits its operations to daytime. This is because train services are vulnerable to vandalism, so they are limiting their operations to daytime for safety reasons.
Despite the challenges, the NRC intends to bring back passenger and freight trains from Port-Harcourt to Aba, Lagos to Kano, and Kaduna because of the dry ports. Okhaira also mentioned that the NRC had a vandalism issue at Warri-Itakpe area in 2023, which was fixed two weeks after the incident took place.