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Spanish engineering firm Typsa has won the lead design consultancy services contract for the long-planned Saudi Landbridge railway network.

Saudi Arabia Railways (SAR) issued the tender in April last year. It included concept design and options development for the preliminary and Issued for Construction (IFC) design stages of the network, as MEED reported.

The estimated SR100bn ($27bn) project comprises more than 1,500km of new track. The core component is a 900km new railway between Riyadh and Jeddah, which will provide direct freight access to the capital from King Abdullah Port on the Red Sea.

Other key sections include upgrading the existing Riyadh-Dammam line, a bypass around the capital called the Riyadh Link, and a link between King Abdullah Port and Yanbu.

The Saudi Landbridge is one of the kingdom’s most anticipated project programmes. Plans to develop it were first announced in 2004, but put on hold in 2010 before being revived a year later. Key stumbling blocks were rights-of-way issues, route alignment and its high cost.

In January, SAR said it would deliver the Saudi Landbridge project through a "new mechanism" by 2034, after failing to reach an agreement with a Chinese consortium to construct it.

In an interview with local media, SAR CEO Bashar Bin Khalid Al-Malik said the consortium failed to meet local content requirements, and the project would now be delivered in several phases through a different procurement model.

In December 2023, MEED reported that a team comprising US-based Hill International, Italy’s Italferr and Spain’s Sener had been awarded the contract to provide project management services for the programme.

If it proceeds, the Saudi Landbridge will be one of the largest railway projects ever undertaken in the Middle East and among the biggest globally.