STUDY ON ARAB RAILWAY NETWORK

Italferr has signed the contract for the execution of the "Arab Railway Network Study" project, funded by the Arab Fund for Social and Economic Development. A study on the overall transportation system of the entire area of the 21 member states of the Arab League (Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Sudan, Morocco, Tunisia, Kuwait, Algeria, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, Mauritania, Somalia, Palestine, Djibouti) aimed at systematising, analysing and planning infrastructural interventions aimed at creating a railway network for the integration of the entire Arab world. It is therefore one of the largest and most ambitious projects internationally, both in terms of its technical-operational characteristics in relation to the vast extent of the work and its socio-economic aspects concerning the impact on the affected population.

The study first defined and then examined in detail a network of approximately 30,000 km of lines of regional significance (existing and non-existing), of which only 11,350 km are in sufficient condition (37 percent of the entire extension), 15,600 km are completely absent ("missing," according to project language) and 3,400 km are not in a state sufficient to accommodate regional traffic ("upgrading links").