Lagos Red Line ready for use, the unveiling- Sanwo-Olu
Sanwo-Olu and Hamzat inside the train
Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu on Saturday said all is now set and ready for the unveiling of the Lagos Red Line rail project by President Bola Tinubu.
Tinubu is expected to inaugurate the Red Line rail project in Lagos on Thursday.
Sanwo-Olu, his deputy, Dr. Kadri Hamzat and members of the State Executive Council inspected the Red Line rail for the final time before its unveiling on Thursday.
The governor and others boarded the train from Ikeja to Iju and back as part of the test-run of the project.
Speaking with newsmen after the test-run and inspection of facilities, Sanwo-Olu said “This one is our final inspection at the Ikeja train station and we just finished another test-run ride on the Redline, using one of the trains and we have had a journey all the way till Iju and back.
“I think you journalists can better report what you saw, but we still have a few cleanings to do inside the train themselves because they still have wrappers around it, so probably all of that, to continue to test the air conditioning which is working, because they all came from different climatic weathers.”
The governor said the only challenge was pedestrians around the track “and the kind of wrong things we saw on those tracks, so you have seen that we will continue to do the enforcement.
“We will continue to do physical barricades on those lines, working with Nigeria Railway Corporation, NRC, but the message here is really for our citizens living virtually on the track that, a track is not a place of residence or commercial activities, we should continue to tell people to stay off it and we will continue to enforce it, and continue to ensure that we clear the tracks because we do not want to record any fatality.”
Sanwo-Olu added that once the intra-train starts, “it is not every two two hours or three hours, it’s going to be fairly regular, 10 minutes, 15 minutes and we don’t want them to be comfortable that they have to stay on the track. It’s not a place for people to stay.
“That is the major challenge, we have reduced it considerably in the last two months and we will not stop. Other than that, I think the stations are ready, the trains are ready, I am sure the gentlemen of the press and Nigerians are ready.”
