In the 21st century, a first-world country without a high-speed rail link between
its two major population, cultural and industrial hubs seems odd.
But
that is indeed the case in Israel. Want to catch a fast train from Jerusalem to
Tel Aviv? You’ll have to wait five years – but the project is well under
way.
Construction work is on schedule and Israel Railway officials are
increasingly confident that the seven billion shekel project – dubbed “Plan A1”
and representing perhaps the largest single infrastructural effort in the
country at the moment – will be crowned with success after many years of
frustrating delays. When the fast trains do start speeding down the tracks, the
officials promise, the impact will be positive and very
noticeable.
Today, an express bus on the 63-kilometer trip from Tel Aviv
to Jerusalem (and vice versa) can take anywhere from 45 minutes to well over an
hour, depending on traffic. The only rail option, albeit a scenic one suitable
for those wishing to see more of the country, takes an hour and a half. It
doesn’t even take travelers into the heart of the capital, depositing them near
the Malha shopping mall in the southwest. The new line will terminate in the
center of Jerusalem, and bring the journey time down to 30 minutes, a boon for
those whose work takes them from one city to another.
“There is a lot of
demand for travel between the cities on a daily basis,” Yaron Ravid, deputy CEO
of Israel Railways, tells The Jerusalem Report. “We won’t have any difficulty
getting passengers. We’ll have four trains leaving in each direction every hour
most hours of the day.”
The trains will reach a top speed of 160
kilometers per hour, easily making them the fastest locomotives ever to barrel
down the tracks in Israel and reducing the time of the journey by two-thirds.
“If you want to be precise about it, the travel time will actually be cut down
to 28 and a half minutes,” says Ravid.
Ravid calls the construction a
“megaproject”.
The double-track line, which will eventually connect
Ben-Gurion International Airport and Jerusalem (the airport is already connected
to Tel Aviv by fast trains), involves more than 56 kilometers of track laid over
difficult terrain. Anyone who has ever visited Jerusalem knows the landscape
surrounding the city comprises sharply sloping hills and deep ravines.
Overcoming these challenges requires the construction of five new tunnels –
including one stretching 11 kilometers, the longest in Israel – and 10 new
bridges, all at considerable cost.
The project also includes constructing
a new main railway station in Jerusalem, on which construction work has already
begun. The new station will be located 80 meters underground, between
Jerusalem’s International Convention Center and the central bus station.
Travelers arriving at the station will easily be able to continue their journeys
either by bus or the light rail. In theory, a tourist coming to Israel intent on
getting to the Old City of Jerusalem will be able to get off the plane at
Ben-Gurion and after going through passport control and collecting her baggage
be in the Old City in less than 40 minutes.
The entire area of the new
railway station is set for a major facelift. In mid-August, the Interior
Ministry gave an initial stamp of approval to construction plans for the
entrance to the city, including 12 new highrise buildings. The construction of
the planned 24- and 33-story buildings, which will house government offices,
private businesses and residential apartments as well as a 2,000- room hotel and
a multiplex cinema, will completely transform the skyline of the
city.
The municipality hopes that the one million square meters of office
and commercial space to be built will provide approximately 40,000 new
jobs.
The new railway station will be a central element in what will
become the city’s central transportation hub. “The new station will contain
thousands of square feet,” Ravid relates. “It will be a very important station
and we at Israel Railways are investing a lot in it.”
The new facility
will be a far cry from the original Jerusalem railway station, constructed in
1892 by the Ottoman Turk administration after it had laid down tracks connecting
Jaffa to Jerusalem – a major modernization effort in what was at the time
considered a minor and backwater province of the Turkish Empire.
The
administration of the British Mandate in Palestine invested relatively heavily
in railway maintenance because the country’s rail tracks were a significant
element of a Mideast-wide rail system connecting Egypt to Lebanon, Syria and
Transjordan – regarded by the British as strategically important for control of
the area.
The creation of the State of Israel, however, brought an end to
rail connections between the country and neighboring lands. Rail construction
and maintenance in general received very low priority in transportation budgets
for many years. Buses became the main mode of public transportation, reportedly
because security officials believed a bus system to be more resilient to
terrorist attacks than a track-based system vulnerable to bombs laid on the
lines.
By 1998, the old railway line between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem was
deemed to be in such a state of disrepair that its service was suspended. Repair
work was conducted on the line over the next seven years until the line was
reopened, but the government opted not to invest in a costly upgrade, deciding
instead that the time had come to construct an entirely new, high-speed
line.
The first step was connecting Tel Aviv with the airport, a
three-year effort completed in 2004. The rail link between the airport and Tel
Aviv is regarded as a resounding success.
Due to the large demand by
tourists seeking to get to Tel Aviv as quickly and easily as possible, even when
their flights landed in the middle of the night, night trains were added to the
line by Israel Railways, a first for Israel.
The next stage of the
project, connecting the airport with nearby Kfar Daniel, was delayed by a common
occurrence in Israeli construction – digging up archaeological relics. Ancient
graves were discovered during construction work not far from Route 1, the main
highway between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. “That did slow down the work,” admits
Ravid, “but we worked with religious authorities as smoothly as possible to have
the graves moved properly and got back to work.”
The phase of the project
that is currently being worked on, extending the rail line from Kfar Daniel all
the way to Jerusalem, is the most challenging in terms of overcoming natural
obstacles. It has also not been without controversy.
Financially, cost
overruns have plagued the project from the start. The initial cost estimates of
less than three billion shekels have long been rendered moot. The current bill
is at about seven billion shekels, but with more than four years to go until
completion, that number could realistically still be considered a moving
target.
Meanwhile, the tremendous amount of earth displaced during the
process of tunnel digging has drawn criticism from environmentalists. So where
do you put all that dirt without causing environmental damage? Ravid says that
Israel Railways and its contractors are taking the matter
seriously.
“When you dig tunnels at the rate we are digging, dealing with
large amounts of earth and dust is always an issue,” he says. “It comes to
millions of cubic feet. We remove a great deal of dug-up earth to specified
locations, to minimize the environmental impact. We are aware of the
issues.”
The Middle East conflict also entangled the project in some
controversy. The railway line passes through the West Bank at two points, one
near Latrun and another north of Mevasseret Zion. That did not escape the notice
of Palestinian advocacy groups, who pressurized European companies involved in
the project to withdraw. Deutsche Bahn, the German national railway operator,
did indeed end its involvement as a result.
By far the biggest
controversy, however, involved a long battle between Israel Railways and
environmental organizations, led by the Society for the Protection of Nature
(SPNI). The group expressed concerns over potential damage that tunnels being
dug for the new rail line could cause to the Yitla stream, which runs alongside
a national park and is even mentioned in the Bible. The SPNI proposed replacing
a bridge and two tunnels with one much longer and deeper tunnel that it claimed
would minimize environmental damage to the stream and the Yitla
Valley.
The Ministry of Finance and Israel Railways opposed the proposed
longer tunnel. The Ministry of the Environment, the SPNI and several other green
groups petitioned the Jerusalem area planning commission, but the commission
ruled in favor of the original Israel Railways plan.
An appeal to the
National Infrastructures Planning Commission also ended in failure in August
2009, when the commission ruled in favor of the bridge over the Yitla stream, as
proposed by Israel Railways, subject to modifications to reduce its overall
footprint.
The SPNI is still sorely disappointed over the Yitla Valley
row. “The environmental damage that we predicted is now taking place and it is
irreversible,” says Dov Greenblatt, SPNI spokesman. “The valley is home to many
plants and animals. Israel Railways’ claim that constructing one long tunnel
would be far more expensive than what their plans called for was always false,
and it is unfortunate that the environment is suffering as a
result.”
Ravid, for his part, strives to sound very environmentally
aware. “At Yitla, our construction works preserve the river in its natural
course and condition. We were careful not to harm the environment,” he says.
“Let me add that I am happy to say that the management of Israel Railways has
that the management of Israel Railways has changed its approach to these issues
relative to that of management in previous years. We take environmental issues
very seriously. There was recently a bit of a dispute regarding the level
of noise that railway construction would cause to residents of Mevasseret Zion,
which is located not far from the new tracks. We have made every effort
to ensure that the noise level is reasonable. We do care. There really
are no conflicts between us and environmentalists.”
The new Tel Av
iv-Jerusalem rail line will be geared toward efficiency – moving people as
quickly as possible.
The old track is certainly inefficient – getting to
Jerusalem by bus from Tel Aviv takes less time – but the natural scenery that
one sees through the train windows as the rail carriages wind their way up the
mountains can be charming. “We haven’t yet decided what to do with the old Tel
Aviv-Jerusalem track,” says Ravid. “It has a lot of value as a tourist and
scenic attraction, and we are considering using it for those
purposes.”
Israel Railways still owns the old Jerusalem railway station
and its environs, near the Khan theater. In conjunction with the Jerusalem
Development Corporation, Israel Railways has leased most of the old warehouse
buildings there for use as restaurants and entertainment halls, creating a new
public space in the center of Jerusalem. This arrangement has so far been
satisfactory to all involved and Ravid says that there is every intention to
continue developing the area.
Besides the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem line, Israel
Railways is working on several other projects. Kfar Saba and Raanana, just north
of Tel Aviv, are slated to be connected to the main coastal rail line, with two
new stations to be constructed in Raanana. Reducing travel time between Tel Aviv
and Beersheba, the southern capital, to 55 minutes from the current hour and a
quarter is in the works, along with a direct rail connection between Beersheba
and Ashkelon, on the Mediterranean coast. There are operative plans for the
construction of a train station in Zichron Yaakov, connecting that town to Haifa
and Tel Aviv along the coastal rail line, along with rail links enabling
passengers to get from Tel Aviv to the southern city of Kiryat Gat in about half
an hour.
In fact, if all of the construction projects in Israel Railways’
portfolio of plans are completed as scheduled, by the first half of the next
decade nearly every significant population center in the country will be
reachable from Tel Aviv by rail within 30 minutes to an hour.
But the
question that is always asked when discussing the subject of rail travel in
Israel is when Eilat – Israel’s southernmost city that sits on the Red Sea –
will finally be connected by train to the rest of the country.
The
project would be a “mega-mega” effort that could require the construction of
dozens of bridges over a route stretching some 350 kilometers.
“Planning
for an Eilat rail line is already taking place,” says Ravid. “That is a project
of national importance and we have been conducting a lot of preparatory
work. Whether or not the project is undertaken depends now on further
government decisions and, of course, on budgeting allocations from the
government.”