ANALYSIS – Fast track: Rail’s bright future in the GCC

Business travellers have a new way to move around the GCC region: taking the train. Green, fast and comfortable, ambitious rail projects are taking shape in the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Qatar that are likely to see many journeys being switched from road and air.

In the UAE, Etihad Rail (no relation to Etihad Airways) opened to freight in 2023, and at an unspecified date later this year the company will launch its first passenger services. Running all the way from Al Sila in the west to Fujairah in the east, around 900km of track will connect 11 cities and key hubs. The network will be served initially by 13 trains carrying up to 400 passengers each at a top speed of 200km per hour.

Abu Dhabi-Dubai, which currently takes around 75-80 minutes by car, will take only 57 minutes by train, while Abu Dhabi-Fujairah will be 105 minutes.

Etihad Rail expects to carry up to 36.5 million passengers annually by 2030. It has an even more ambitious plan to create a high-speed line between Abu Dhabi and Dubai. With a projected  maximum speed of 350km  per hour, that would reduce the journey time to a mere 30 minutes.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia is already embracing high-speed rail. In December 2025, it signed a formal agreement with Qatar to connect Riyadh and Doha airports. Journeys, at speeds up to 300km per hour, will take two hours, compared with a flight time of 90 minutes, although of course total trip times look very different once procedures such as check-in and passport and security clearance are taken into account.

The Riyadh-Doha line, which is expected to serve 10 million passengers per year, will also connect to Dammam and Al-Hofuf. In addition, Saudi Arabia has started building a 900km “Landbridge” railway that connects Riyadh with Jeddah.

The arrival of rail in the GCC opens exciting possibilities for travel managers. The benefits are enormous. Any company trying to reduce its carbon footprint caused by business travel will be able to turn to a much more sustainable option. Although comparable figures would undoubtedly be different in the GCC, a recent study in the UK found that rail journeys produce 13 times fewer carbon emissions than flying, nine times fewer than travelling in a petrol or diesel car, and even 2.5 times fewer than an electric car.

Rail travel is also much less stressful and more productive for passengers. They have more time across the entire journey to focus on their work or simply to relax and watch the world pass by their window.

In Europe, companies often set a policy that their business travellers must use the train as their first option, in some cases for journeys as long as four hours. Some companies encourage travellers to switch by allowing them to buy rail tickets in first class.

Where travel managers may encounter problems with rail is that it is not always well integrated into corporate travel processes. For example, availability on online booking tools is patchy. Above all, travellers struggle to book rail journeys outside their own country.

Etihad Rail and Saudi Arabia Railways will have the advantage of being new into the market compared with European rail providers that have legacy processes dating back many decades. It will be very interesting to see how they take advantage of starting with a clean sheet and how well they listen to the corporate travel sector to make them as easy to work with as possible. But for many business journeys within the GCC, the future surely belongs to rail.