21 September 2004
Agence France Presse
Copyright Agence France-Presse, 2004 All reproduction and presentation rights reserved.

RIYADH, Sept 21 (AFP) -

It is nearly 6:00 pm at Riyadh's only railway station -- a rush-hour time almost worldwide -- but in this tidy terminal, no more than 20 people including staff members are around.

It is not a strike that is keeping passengers away from the modern station.

It's just that the last train to the eastern city of Dammam left more than two hours ago, while the next departure is not for another three hours.

"Many people are usually around when there is a train," said the Pakistani taxi driver who argued with a rival over a passenger at the deserted taxi bay.

Only four passenger trains per day operate from the six-platform station and along the sole operating track in the vast desert kingdom. The trains carried around 900,000 passengers in 2003 between the capital -- home to some four million -- and the center of the oil-rich Eastern Province.

The Saudi Railways Organisation (SRO) believes that the existing service has improved immensely during the past three years in terms of passengers and freight transport.

Khaled al-Yahya, who heads SRO, said that the number of passengers increased by 25 percent during the past three years, while freighted goods increased by over 33 percent to two million tonnes.

The line serves mainly as a connection between the King Abdul Aziz port on the Gulf and the capital. Freight trains transported around 120,000 containers during the last Islamic calendar year, Yahya told AFP.

The trains cross the 450-kilometer (280-mile) distance in four hours. Yahya said that trains in Saudi Arabia "rank third in Asia in terms of speed".

But SRO has ambitious plans to crisscross the kingdom, which is around four times the size of France, with a rail network connecting the main cities scattered across the endless desert.

"The kingdom's economy ranks among the largest 25 economies in the world. But as far as the rail network is concerned, and taking into consideration the size of the territory and population growth, the kingdom comes around 70th," Yahya said.

A 950-kilometer (600-mile) loop from Riyadh to Jeddah on the Red Sea is the centerpiece of a multi-billion-dollar expansion plan, joining existing lines from the capital to the oil city of Dammam.

This coast-coast line would cut transportation time for containers from Dammam to Riyadh and on to the Jeddah Islamic Port, the kingdom's main sea outlet, by about a week compared to shipping.

A 115-kilometer (70-mile) line will also be built between Dammam, the city's international airport and the industrial seaport of Jubail on the Gulf.

A 570-kilometer (355-mile) line between Mecca, Medina and Jeddah and extending north to the Red Sea industrial city of Yanbu is also planned to ease the travel of some two million pilgrims who visit Muslim holy sites during the annual pilgrimage.

But the government wants to build the railway network without tapping its coffers, relying instead on private investments -- a step that reflects the scarcity of disposable public funds and the increasing belief in the need to ease the public sector's grip over economic activities.

The expansion plan is currently in the hands of a consultancy consortium, which has teamed Swiss UBS bank and the Saudi National Commercial Bank with France's state-run railways SNCF, to prepare the studies for the project "which will be tendered on BOT (build, operate and transfer) basis", Yahya said.

The kingdom, which aims to privatise the whole network eventually, will continue using diesel-fueled locomotives in the new expanded network.

It is not "economically feasible to use an electric network due to the long distances and low level of usage", added Yahya.