Trains, planes and more trains (or metros)

Is it finally happening? It was conceived back in 2013 and was supposed to take four years to build but the Riyadh metro looks like it is about to open. To the hard-pressed inhabitants of the Saudi capital, that can only be a good thing. Alternatives to the car and bus – Riyadh has a new bus system as well – are badly needed in the fast-growing but choked metropolis.

Mysterious “testing” of the metro has been going on for at least a year – so let us hope it works. The ambition of the Saudi metropolitan authorities is commendable: six lines, 84 stations and 176km of track. Bids have been invited for a seventh metro line in the Saudi capital. Schemes are also planned for Mecca and the eastern port of Dammam.

Progress, too, on the railway line linking Oman and the UAE. Hafeet Rail, formerly Oman and Etihad Rail Company, has secured funding of $1.5 billion for a 238km railway network. The intention is to link five major ports and various industrial and free zones across the two Gulf states.

And construction work on Phase 3 of the UAE rail project, a high-speed passenger link between Dubai and Abu Dhabi, is about to get under way, according to reports. Great. Let us hope it spares us the scary Ben-Hur experience that is the main highway.

From metros to freight lines, there is finally momentum around the building of railways in the Gulf and beyond. For some years the only operational line on the Gulf coast has been Etihad Rail’s freight-only scheme linking Ghwaifat, Ruwais and Fujairah.

Anything that takes cars – weapons of mass urban destruction – off the road is to be encouraged. The Saudi Roads General Authority has said that Saudi Railways transported more than 13 million tonnes of goods by trains during the first half of 2024, removing more than one million truck journeys from the roads. For car-mad Saudis, this is a telling conversion.

The six members of the GCC have been talking about an international rail network since at least 2004. But plans have been thwarted because of costs – and lack of political will. Whisper it quietly, but people often prefer to fly, the airlines are powerful and there are vested interests in trucking.

An only slightly self-serving consultant told AGBI last year that investing an extra $220 billion into GCC metro systems could lead to $700 billion worth of benefits over 20 years. Something of that is now happening.

Saudi Arabia has got the bit between its teeth because the Mecca-Medina high speed line taking in Jeddah is a big success – a nasty fire at the station in Jeddah notwithstanding.

The Riyadh-Dammam (to the east coast) and Riyadh-Hail-Jawf (north) routes are operational, if underused. There are signs of life even in Kuwait, where Saudi Arabia and the emirate have rekindled prospects of a rail link. Less happily, Kuwait said earlier this year that it was cancelling a metro project for Kuwait City because of “difficulty with funding”.

In Dubai, the metro is a hit and we await the opening of the third line in 2029. When finished, capacity in the Gulf’s commercial capital will increase from 101km to 131km.

If the city-state is to hit its target of a near-doubling of its population by 2040 – a scant 16 years away – it will need all of that mileage. You can’t get on the metro at peak hours. Plans for sky pods – can we call them cable cars? – are an indication of the pressures on Dubai’s vaunted infrastructure. It is creaking.

Even Baghdad is getting its act together. Algeria, Jordan and Egypt are also seeing the virtues of rail.

But we await the Landbridge. This project to link Riyadh with the west coast has been around for decades. It will be expensive at $7 billion. At the tail end of last year, it emerged that Italferr, an Italian consulting and project company, Sener of Spain, and Hill International, a US-based construction management expert, had been selected to build.

But an official to whom we spoke this week said only that it was hoped that financing for the scheme would be signed off “within months”. The project has been in gestation for at least 30 years and it may be that, given pressures of other giga-projects, Expo 2030 and the 2034 World Cup, Landbridge is not going to receive priority financing.

Some years ago my father was arrested for trainspotting in Iraq. He could never resist a steam engine – or even the prospect of one. He said it was technology you could see and understand. The Saddam-era Baathists let him out of detention after an hour in sheer bewilderment.

Years later, the post-invasion US-advised ministry of transport was based temporarily at Baghdad’s magnificent Central Station. Visit if you can. Only don’t get arrested.

We like a train, even an electric one.

James Drummond is Editor-in-Chief of AGBI. This article first appeared in his weekly newsletter – register here