Commuters boarding a train at Syokimau Railway Station in Nairobi. FILE
Kenya Railways Corporation (KRC) has announced plans to start a daily train service connecting Nairobi’s central business district to Kahawa as part of government efforts to ease traffic congestion in the capital city.
The new service will start on Monday next week.
“As part of the ongoing efforts by the government to de-congest the Nairobi CBD, we shall introduce a new commuter train service to ply the Kahawa-Nairobi route,” KRC said in a statement.
The train will leave Nairobi at 7.40 am for Kahawa where it is scheduled to arrive at 8.40am.
The return journey to Nairobi starts at 9 am and is expected to take one hour and 20 minutes.
The schedule appears to go against the trend where there is heavy demand for vehicles from the outskirts to Nairobi’s CBD in the early morning hours, with relatively little traffic in the opposite direction.
The new service has necessitated a change in time schedules for the Kikuyu-Nairobi train which will start its journey at 6am in Kikuyu to arrive in Nairobi at 7.20am.
The development comes hardly a week after the government announced plans to dedicate bus rapid transport lanes for large capacity buses along Thika and Mombasa highways in a bid to de-congest Nairobi’s busiest roads.
