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Movement from one location to another is made possible through transportation of good and service. The importance of the transport sector in the Nigeria economy cannot be over emphasised as it serves as part of the indices by which the Real Gross Domestic Product (RGDP) of a country is measured. This work evaluates the performance of Rail and Pipeline Transport (RPT) in Nigeria between 1981 to 2019. To achieve this, secondary data were obtained from the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) statistical Bulletin of 2019 in which the RGDP of the various transport modes from 1981 to 2019 were extracted so as to determine the performance of the different mode of transport and their contribution to the development of the Nigeria transport sector using trend and Pearson product correlation analysis. The findings showed that amongst all the transport modes listed i.e (Road Transport (RT) with the highest correlation of 1.00, Water Transport (WT) with 0.958, Air Transport (AT) with 0.993, Transport Services (TS) with 0.960 and Logistical transport Services (LS) with 0.860) contribute more to RGDP than the Rail and Pipeline Transport sector which performed with a negative correlation of -0.245 to the economy. The poor performance of this sector can be attributed to inappropriate investment and handling of these all-important transport sector hence the Federal government should invest more in this sub-sector and allow private hands to run its administration.

Keywords: Rail transport, pipeline transport, freight services, RGDP