by Adedayo Ademuwagun

Dele Oyebanji is a young man who lives in a neighbourhood near the Mushin train station in Lagos. He gets to see trains come and go everyday, but he has never been in a train before. Like Dele, many people in Lagos are not accustomed to getting around by train. Most people solely travel by road.

In Lagos, there is a rail-road that stretches from Apapa to Agbado and further to Ijoko in Ogun state. Trains that ply this road make multiple trips every day except Sundays.

This morning I took a ride on one of the regular trains from Ijoko to Apapa.

Gbemisola Atanda is one of the passengers on the train. She lives in Ijoko and works in Ikeja. She goes to work and returns every weekday by train.

She says, “I’ve been going this way for like seven years now. Normally I go to work by the morning train at the Oponsuru station at 6.25am. Then after work I catch the evening train at the Ikeja station. I prefer the train to the bus because it is faster and it costs me less.”

Another passenger named Adams Adedamola says, “I work around Apapa and I live at Agege. I close at my workplace by 5, and I prefer to come home by train because of the jammed traffic on the roads.

“Usually I get home in one hour, but if I chose to take the bus, I wouldn’t get home till after 10pm. The train is a lot better for me.”

But riding on the train has its own downsides. During rush hour in the mornings and evenings, the trains often get crowded. Each train has about twelve 90-seater coaches, and when the seats in the coaches are all taken, people stand.

On this trip, the train sets off at 6.27am and people are going to work. It is crowded. The seats are all taken and people are standing.

In my coach, about 30 people who got in at the take-off station are standing and 90 are sitting. As we stop at the first few stations, more people get in and have to stand, such that after a while there are double the number of people standing.

Outside, some people are hanging on to external railings of the train. These ones haven’t got a ticket. Inside, the sign on the wall says “No preaching and hawking inside the coaches”, but every now and then a hawker comes into this coach to sell something.