The East District Manager of the Nigerian Railway Corporation (NRC), Enugu, Mr Olusoji Osidipe, has bemoaned the activities of vandals which have made it impossible for trains to run in the Eastern part of Nigeria, particularly from Enugu to Port Harcourt.
Osidipe, who disclosed this in an interview on Tuesday, said that rail tracks were being vandalised.
He said trains could not operate without rail.
Before now, he said that the corporation was grappling with the problems of vandalism and erosion that had been washing away rail lines.
He said the NRC management had helped to curb erosion thereby leaving the issue of vandalism.
According to Osidipe, those that sell scraps are encouraging the vandals by buying vandalised NRC property.
He said NRC had employed the services of the Railway Police as well as the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps (NSCDC) to curb the vandalism but the problem had persisted.
He stressed that once they were able to check vandalism of the rail lines, trains would continue to ply again in the East.
He also lamented that they were operating between Enugu and Ovim in Abia State until March 2020 when COVID-19 lockdown came but only returned to find that the rails had been vandalised.
The District Manager who said that the people didn’t know that the railway was their property urged the communities where rails passed to stop the vandalism.
He said the rail track vandalism would have stopped if there were no buyers of the vandalised products like scrap dealers.
