Where does rail fit in when shipping is back to normal?

The Gulf rail workaround is moving from emergency rerouting to a recovery-phase strategy. The question for Gulf rail is no longer whether trains can carry crisis cargo – they already did — but which of those emergency workarounds become permanent second routes and which fade as shipping normalizes.

The restart is a two-strait problem: Hormuz reopening does not restore normal flows if the Red Sea remains unsafe, and vice versa. Rail normalization therefore waits on the slower of the two maritime recoveries, Urs Mosimann, a former strategy director at Etihad Rail and a Dubai-based transport, logistics, and infrastructure expert, tells EnterpriseAM. The binding constraint is the security and ins. environment, not readiness — war-risk premiums, protection-and-indemnity cover, and stranded fleet positions have to normalize before the sea reclaims its default share.

Rail’s response has to be separated into blocks. The first block is utilization of the asset base that already exists — more services, more frequent running where crew allows, reactivated corridors. The second is rolling-stock capital, where locomotives and wagons carry two-to-three-year lead times and only make sense against sustained baseline demand. The third is network capital, where new lines are 50-year-plus assets governed by long-run demand, Mosimann says.

The crisis proved that the fast lever works. Etihad Rail Freight moved 459k tons and around 7.9k containers on more than 100 trains in nine days, using its existing fleet of 38 locomotives and more than 1k wagons, while activating additional corridors and pushing intermodal capacity toward east-coast ports. “No new line was laid to do this. No locomotive was ordered. The railway simply ran harder on the track it had,” Mosimann says. Saudi Arabia Railways opened a Gulf-to-Jordan freight corridor from Dammam, Jubail, and King Fahd ports to Al Haditha on the Jordanian border, more than 1.7k km on the existing North-South line, carrying more than 400 containers per train, with onward reach at Aqaba.

“The crisis leaves rail busier, not bigger,” Mosimann says. Rail keeps a larger role than it had before the war, but a modest one, and only where the reason is proven economics or deliberate policy. Two increments stand out. The first is any lane where rail proved genuinely cost-competitive during the disruption: a corridor with the right distances and volumes, where the economics worked on their own terms rather than only under emergency conditions, can retain real and durable business as a secondary route.

The second is the political increment on capital. A government may choose to underwrite a corridor for its strategic value, accepting a lower return hurdle to buy resilience. The Saudi design tender on the 672 km Al Khafji-to-Al Batha segment of the GCC Railway — issued in May, covering the Saudi side of the link toward Ghuwaifat — is exactly this channel in motion. It is a real cross-border milestone, but it remains a design tender, not a construction start or financial close, and the broader GCC Railway program predates the conflict.

Sea is the cheapest mode for the long haul, and when it returns, it pulls volumes back off both rail and road. “Rail does not get to hold a share it cannot defend on price against either of them,” Mosimann says.

The limits of rail

Capacity is the hard ceiling. Against UAE domestic container demand of roughly 6-7 mn TEU a year, rail can absorb low hundreds of thousands of TEU of diverted cargo today, rising into the low mns within three to five years under a focused program and capped by a five-link stack of east-coast port capacity, rail terminals, rolling-stock availability, single-track sections, and inland receiving terminals at ICAD, Jebel Ali, and Khalifa, Mosimann tells us. The binding constraints now are the missing rail connection at Khorfakkan and the cross-border gap to Saudi Arabia.

Rail ticks the right boxes, but not every box. Where rail connects directly to a port on one side and needs only one truck feeder, it can start beating direct trucking somewhere past 200-250 km. Where rail needs feeders on both ends, the haul has to clear roughly 400-500 km before rail gains. Cross-border flows are the exception: customs-bonded trains can cross without stopping, while trucks queue at the border, which can swing the time comparison sharply toward rail.

The one worth building is already underway

“The genuine resilience story is not new and is not war-driven. It is the multi-corridor network already being built: Indian Ocean access through Fujairah and Sohar; Red Sea access through the Saudi Landbridge and the SAR-to-Jordan corridor; northbound reach through the UAE-Jordan railway toward Aqaba and, eventually, the Mediterranean and Turkey,” Mosimann says.

Saudi Arabia and Turkey are exploring a rail link through Jordan and Syria, with MoUs covering rail cooperation, logistics, signaling, communications systems, and digitization already signed — though around 400 km is still missing between Jordan and Syria, and reconstruction, customs harmonization, and financing still need to come together before it operates as a through-corridor.

“Connect those, and no single chokepoint — at sea or on land — shuts the region down. The two-strait disruption is in fact the cleanest argument for that diversity: a Hormuz workaround that leans on Red Sea ports is only ever as good as the safety of the Bab El Mandeb. Real resilience needs more than one alternative,” Mosimann adds.