The Nigeria Railways Corporation (NRC) said two new speed locomotives will be deployed on the Abuja-Kaduna standard gauge by next month.

NRC Liaison Officer, Pascal Nnorli, disclosed to journalists in Abuja that locomotive, which arrived Abuja last month are built to travel up to 150km per hour.

With the new locomotives, mass transportation of goods and people are expected to improve on the axis while travel time from Abuja-Kaduna would be cut from about 2:45 minutes to about 1:30 minutes.

"Once we deploy the new locomotives, timing of our services will be strict. We will obey our train schedule strictly and judiciously," he said.

Noting that the number of daily trains services would improve from the present four, Nnorli said the handing over of the new locomotives by the China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation (CCECC), to the NRC management would be complete and training would commence and would be followed by test run before commercial deployment.

"The training should last for about two weeks. After the two weeks training, the locomotives will be test run for about a week before it will be launched for commercial operations. All these processes shouldn't be more than a month, all things equal," he explained.