The Nigerian Railway Corporation Act of 1955 transferred the railway from a department of the colonial government to a self-accounting public corporation, modelled on British Rail (nationalised 1948). The Corporation took over a system of 3,505 km of 3'6" Cape-gauge track, 11,000 wagons, 422 locomotives, and 38,000 employees — the largest single employer in West Africa after the British Army.
The two decades that followed were the railway's peak. Annual freight tonnage passed 3 million tonnes in 1964 (compared with 1.5 million in 1948 and 380,000 in 1914). Passenger journeys passed 11 million in 1964 — a figure the system has not approached since. The Maiduguri extension (1964) added 640 km of new track in the North-East, finally connecting Borno to Lagos by rail. The Bornu Extension was the only major new line built by an independent Nigerian government in the entire twentieth century. Diesel locomotives — the English Electric Type 1 (1955) and the General Motors GL26C (1965) — replaced the last Lagos-yard steam by 1972. The Apapa-Iddo direct line through the Lagos lagoon halved cross-Lagos freight times.
The Corporation also became the country's largest technical training ground. The Railway Training School at Zaria (1956) and the Locomotive Workshops at Ebute Metta produced engineers, machinists, draughtsmen, and accountants in numbers no Nigerian university could match. Hundreds of NRC-trained engineers went on to lead the new state-owned enterprises of the 1960s and 1970s — NEPA, NIPOST, NNPC, Nigerian Airways. The Railway Sports Club at Ebute Metta produced more Nigerian international athletes between 1958 and 1975 than any single institution outside the Armed Forces.
And then the railway met the **oil decade**. Three things, in the same five years, broke the system. First, the construction boom of 1973–1978 — Festac, Ajaokuta, the new universities, the Trans-Saharan Highway, the Lagos–Ibadan Expressway (1978) — moved federal capital expenditure decisively into road construction and away from rail maintenance. Second, the abolition of the marketing boards in the Indigenisation Decree wave and the simultaneous collapse of groundnut and cotton exports erased the railway's most reliable freight customer overnight; the groundnut pyramids of Kano, which had been loaded onto NRC wagons every November, were gone by 1980. Third, the trucking lobby — increasingly powerful, increasingly tied to military procurement contracts — captured the federal Ministry of Transport. By 1978, NRC freight had collapsed to 1.1 million tonnes. By 1985, it was below 400,000. The peak was over. The institution would spend the next thirty years arguing about whether the collapse was technical or political. It was both.
Figure 1
Nigerian Railway: route-km in service, 1901–2024
The colonial network was finished in 1927 and not extended for ninety years. The standard-gauge era began in 2016.
Figure 2
NRC annual passengers, 1955–2024 (millions)
From 17 million riders a year in the 1960s to under a million by 2015. The Abuja-Kaduna and Lagos-Ibadan SG lines have only partly reversed it.