Haramain contractors given notice to make up lost time

摘要

No sooner had the first of 36 Talgo trainsets being built for the Haramain High Speed Railway been dispatched from the port of Barcelona on December 12 en route to Jeddah - where it arrived on December 23 -than news emerged that the project was in trouble. Abdullah Al-Muqbel, named as Saudi Arabia's Minister of Transport on December 8, lost no time in making his own assessment of the project, visiting some of the Haramain worksites within days of his appointment. During a two-day tour of the construction sites, he quickly determined that the scheme to build a 450 km high speed line between the holy cities of Makkah and Madinah was running behind schedule. When the contract was agreed in October 2011 and signed in January 2012, trains were expected to be running in 2014 (RG 7.12 p32). This immensely ambitious timescale reflected the priority status accorded to the project by the Saudi government.