Amman has begun forming a committee to oversee tendering for the Amman-Zarqa railway.

The JD236m ($333m) project has been on hold since April when Jordan’s Transport Ministry decided to restructure the scheme after terminating the contract of a winning consortium for the second time (MEED 9:4:09).

The 28-kilometre light railway will now be built as a public procurement scheme (PPS), the government abandoning a build-operate-transfer (BOT)framework.

The new committee will break the work into affordable packages and set out a tendering process for each.

In April, Kuwait’s Aknan Global and Spain’s Ineco failed to raise sufficient funding for the scheme by the agreed deadline.

In March 2008, the consortium comprising Pakistan’s Infrastructure Development Company and China Railway Engineering Corporation was dropped from the project for unspecified “legal reasons”.