Africa’s incredible new £1bn railway with 100mph trains links two huge cities

has big plans to revitalise its economy and connect its most important cities through a massive railway line.

One section, the Lagos-Ibadan , has already been completed and has dramatically improved the lives of its users.

The journey between , Nigeria’s most populous city and Ibadan, which is home to over four million people as of 2024, previously took three to four hours along the heavily trafficked Lagos-Ibadan expressway.

The Lagos-Ibadan railway was a from the old, narrow-gauge line that dated back to the colonial era, one plagued by issues including inefficiency and being prone to frequent breakdowns.

Constructed by the Civil Engineering Construction Corporation, who were awarded a contract of a staggering $1.53 billion (£12.2 billion), the journey can now be completed in just over two hours, with trains running at speeds of 150 kph, or 100 mph.

The line was completed in 2021 after years of delays, including heavy rains in 2018, the 2019 Nigerian election when the corporation removed all its Chinese workers for safety reasons, and the . The Nigerian government also had to deploy soldiers to protect the railway workers from criminals and armed robbers.

The railway was officially inaugurated by President Muhammadu Buhari on 10 June 2021.

It is the first phase of a much larger project, the , an ambitious project that aims to connect Nigeria’s southern economic regions to its populous northern regions across a distance of around 684 miles.

Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka became a frequent passenger on the train, calling it “a very impressive work in progress considering the difficulty of really executing anything in this country”.

Lagos is the most populous city of Nigeria, spread across two main islands and onto the mainland in the southwest of the country on the Coast. With an estimated population of 8.8 million inhabitants in the city, or 16 million in the metropolitan area, Lagos ranks as the most populous city in Africa, after overtaking Cairo.

While being the country’s financial capital, it is also famous throughout Africa for its music scene and is the centre of the country’s movie industry, dubbed “Nollywood”.

Ibadan, meanwhile, is the largest city in West Africa in terms of geographical mass and used to be the capital of the entire South West Nigeria region, excluding Lagos. It is found 80 miles inland of northeast Lagos and 330 miles southwest of Abuja, the federal capital.

It is a prominent transit point between the coastal region and the more remote areas of the country.