FG to unbundle Nigeria Railway Corporation for private sector investment

The Federal Government has initiated the process of amending the Nigeria Railway Cooperation Act to unbundle the cooperation for private sector investment.

The Minister of Transport, Sa’id Alkali, disclosed this during a tour of the Idu and Kubwa Train station yesterday in Abuja alongside some investors, the Infrastructure Concession Regulatory Commission and other critical stakeholders in the railway sector.

He said, “The idea is to unbundle the Nigeria Railway. Already National Assembly has started the process of unbundling the Nigeria Railway Act to repeal and re-enactment so that we allow private investors to come on and invest in all our rail corridors.”

Speaking on the plan to convert locomotive engines from diesel to CNG, he said 60 percent cost of diesel will be saved from the retrofitting process of the engines.

The Minister said, “What we are doing is that we want to cut cost, when you look at the 70% component of the LNG, as against the 70% that was used on diesel, certainly the cost of using LNG will be drastically reduced to about 60 percent.”

He said, “The milestone achieved in the conversion of NRC locomotives to run on diesel/LNG will further save the cost of running the commercial trains.”

The Minister further explained that “the locomotives were using diesel 100%. By retrofitting, we are going to use LNG 70% and diesel 30%. That is what we mean by retrofitting.

“The idea is by the time you use LNG 70%, the cost of running the locomotives will drastically be reduced. I am assuring Nigerians that we are going to enforce that. By the time all our locomotives are retrofitted, certainly, the cost of transportation must drop drastically.

Alkali declined the possibility of the retrofitted locomotive running 100 percent on LNG, stating that “you convert to LNG 100% because it is a heavy engine. Normally, combustion is done with smaller engines like generators and cars. But these locomotives were manufactured on diesel and it is not possible technically to convert them to CNG or LNG 100%.”