2 September 2004
ANSA - English Media Service
(c) 2004 ANSA.

(ANSA) - ABU DHABI, September 2 - Almost a century after it had been sabotaged by British officer and explosives expert Lawrence of Arabia the railway crossing the Arab Peninsula built by the Turks is about to be reconstructed.

In three years' time a modern railway will join the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, providing transportation of goods and people across the peninsula.

The project was announced by the Secretariat General of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), a body grouping Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and the UAE in charge of fostering cooperation between the member states in all fields.

The GCC has already commissioned the Islamic Development Bank to carry out the feasibility study on the construction of the railway.

Trains disappeared from the peninsula after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, at the time of the Arab independence movement. The first and so far last rail road constructed on the Arab Peninsula is the Turkish Hejaz rail road, whose construction started in 1864 and ended in 1908. Hejaz was initially conceived as a "religious rail road" to aid the Hajj pilgrimage from Damascus to Medina but was later used by the Turks for transporting arms and troops during the Ottoman Empire's occupation of the peninsula.

After the attacks of Lawrence of Arabia, the rail road sank into oblivion, a process further aided by the appearance of more convenient means of transport such as cars and airplanes. After World War One there had been several attempts at reviving the old railway but all of them were abandoned as the costs were too high.

The GCC countries are mulling the construction of a rail road with an entirely new route but no official information on the issue has been released yet. Khalid Al Yahya, head of the Saudi Railway General Establishment (SRGE), said the company had already conducted a study on the possible construction of four domestic railways with a total length of 2,915 km worth $960 million. One of the railways will cross Saudi Arabia from West to East connecting the port of Jeddah with Ad Dammam and Al Jubail and will be 950 km long. The North-South line, which will be 1,408 km long, will connect capital Riyadh with the north of the country. The other two lines will run between Ad Dammam and Al Jubail and between the holy cities of Mecca and Medina.

The Saudi project has already been approved by the country's Supreme Economic Council and the SRGE has signed an agreement with a consortium of local and international banks for the financing of the project. The feasibility study will be carried out by the French railways.

The tender for constructing the West-East railway, which is expected to cost $933 million, is already open to both local and foreign potential contractors.

Dubai, one of the seven United Arab Emirates, too has a project for the construction of an urban railway network. With its urban area rising at a rate of 3.9 percent a year and a population rising at 4.5 percent a year, the city of Dubai is rapidly becoming congested with traffic. Apart from the project for an urban railway, there is also a project for building a rail road to connect Dubai with the capital Abu Dhabi (ANSA).