Saudi Railway Company (SAR) has invited five firms to submit bids for the project management consultancy contract for the kingdom’s planned $7bn Landbridge rail project.

The five firms have until 12 May to submit bids for the project management deal. The prequalifiers are:

• Aecom (US)
• Bechtel (US)
• Fluor (US)
• KBR (US)
• WorleyParsons (Australia)

The project management firms were prequalified by SAR after submitting expressions of interest (EoI) in February.

The Saudi Landbridge is a 950-kilometre-long passenger and cargo railway, which will link Jeddah on the Red Sea coast and the ports of Dammam and Jubail on the Gulf coast, through the kingdom’s capital Riyadh. The Landbridge railway will be able to transport 8 million tonnes of containers each year when complete.

SAR is also understood to have invited about 15 companies to bid for the detailed engineering design deal by 26 May. The successful bidder is expected to complete the engineering design work in just 13 months, which is a tight time-frame to design a complicated project. About 70 kilometres of the railway will have to be tunnels in order to get through the mountains in the central part of the kingdom.

The Saudi Landbridge project was first launched in 2005, but has faced a number of delays due to issues over financing. It was initially planned to be developed on a 50-year build operate transfer (BOT) scheme financed through debt. In August 2009, the Saudi government decided to fund the scheme on its own after private banks proved unwilling to finance the project.

In October 2011, the rail project was approved by Saudi Arabia’s Council of Ministers. The project is now expected to be financed by the Public Investment Fund (PIF), which is part of the kingdom’s Finance Ministry. SAR is fully owned by the PIF, and was established in 2006 to build, manage and operate the North-South railway project.