The China Railway Construction Corporation Limited (CRCC) has blamed ill luck for the frequent malfunctioning of trains it built and supplied for use in Nigeria.
Su Zhiguang, the after-sales manager of CRCC, who heads the maintenance team on the Abuja-Kaduna rail line, said that the trains, which arrived Nigeria in January 2020, were test run and certified ready for deployment in China, Peoples Gazette reports.
Over the past few weeks, at least three trains had broken down after suffering mechanical failures in quick succession, leaving many passengers stranded in isolated areas.
When asked why the trains were frequently breaking down only a few months after they were commissioned, the CRCC engineer said: “It’s hard to say, maybe bad luck because the trains were newly built and certified okay by our company in China before they were sent to Nigeria in January.”
“In my many years of experience in after-sales service, this situation is the first I’m seeing
“2701 and 2702 locomotives are produced by our company (CRCC). In China and other countries, we don’t have so many problems (mechanical faults). We’ve built trains that are still under our warranty and functioning for several years. There shouldn’t be too many problems with new locomotives”.