The emergency meeting among transport ministers in the GCC, tentatively set between late March and early April, has been cancelled.

“There is no real urgency to justify [holding] an emergency meeting,” a UAE-based source tells MEED. Instead, the regular annual ministerial meeting will be held sometime in September or October.

The cancelled meeting was supposed to be held in Riyadh, with the ministers expected to discuss a new timeline for the regional railway link.

“The committee meetings [for the GCC rail project] are held regularly, the project milestones are proceeding as scheduled,” the source tells MEED. ”We will have to wait until the next meeting [for] a new timeline [to] be adopted.”

The original completion date for the 2,137-kilometre GCC rail network was set for 2018, which everyone now agrees is impossible to meet.

Abu Dhabi’s decision in January to suspend the tender for the second phase of its mainline rail has created major implications for the other domestic rail lines that were designed to comprise the regional rail network.

The suspension of the tender for the Etihad Rail’s second phase, which was designed to link with Oman’s railway network through Buraimi, is understood to have prompted Muscat to focus mainly on building a domestic rail network.

The original timeline for the regional rail development was understood to help keep the momentum going for Kuwait’s national railroad project, originally due to start prequalification in the first quarter of 2016.

The start of the Kuwait rail project’s prequalification phase has since been moved to the second quarter of this year.

The release of Qatar’s long-distance rail tender, originally set for the first quarter of 2016, has also been postponed to 2017.

Studies are understood to be under way for the rail line along the King Fahd Causeway that will link Bahrain and Saudi Arabia.