The Minister of Transport, Senator Said Alkali, has assured that all things being equal, the suspended Abuja-Kaduna train line may be restored in the next 10 days.
The minister gave the assurance during an on-the-spot inspection of the ongoing clearing of the accident scene on Monday, following the derailment of the train on August 26. He said work is progressing well, and in the next ten days, the tracks will be restored.
He said, “As you can see during my tour, what is affected by the accident is about 150 meters. So it’s not too long. We will be able to fix the sleepers, the pallets and the rail track so that we will be back in operation. It is a cardinal responsibility of the government to provide welfare for its citizens.”
He added, “We are trying to fix the infrastructure so that we have a bigger crane, so that we can move the coaches and all the locomotives that are on the site. Insha’Allah, within the next 48 hours, we will be able to relocate all of them from the site. And after that, if we didn’t have any weather challenge, in the next 10 days, we are going to restore the line.”
Alkali disclosed that at the time the accident occurred, the locomotive was carrying eight coaches. “We have successfully moved four out of the place, as you can see,” he said.
He applauded the security and other stakeholders for their efforts to ensure the safety of passengers, workers and train facilities in the ongoing operations to restore the damaged tracks and coaches.
He also stated that the staff of the Nigerian Railway Corporation have been working day and night to ensure that the clearing and repairing of the damaged tracks are done at the earliest possible time.
He said, “Let me start by thanking Mr. President and commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, for his support since the incident happened. He has given us support to ensure that we move the locomotive and the coaches and fix the rail line so that we will be back in operation.
“From what I have seen, I also want to commend the managing director, NRC and his team because they are on site, as you can see, day and night, trying to restore normalcy after the incident that occurred.”
He explained that the incident occurred at a point intersection. “Normally, we are running around two trains at a time. So there are points where the two trains will interchange. So normally, we have a point there. That was where the incident occurred.. However, I am not in a position to preempt the investigation and explain why the incident happened,” he said.
On the efforts to prevent such events from happening again, the minister said, “The teams are doing their best to ensure that such doesn’t happen again. However, it is the outcome of the investigation that will now reveal what actually happened. Then we’ll look at it and we ensure it doesn’t happen again by the grace of God Almighty.”
