The Middle East’s first high-speed railway: 450 kilometres of desert-rated track at 300 km/h, Makkah to Madinah in two hours — with Jeddah as the spine’s urban hinge, 43 minutes from the Haram.
Inaugurated in September 2018, the Haramain High-Speed Railway is the Middle East’s first HSR: a Spanish-built, desert-engineered line whose five stations — Makkah, Jeddah Al-Sulimaniyah, Jeddah Airport, KAEC, Madinah — handle the Hajj and Umrah flows that no other railway on earth must absorb.
The Makkah–Madinah journey fell from five-plus hours by road to around two by rail. Jeddah sits at the hinge: 77 km from Makkah (43 minutes), with the airport station 17 km further on — an integrated air-rail corridor from runway to sanctuary.
The railway has carried over 60 million passengers since 2018. Average daily ridership passed 39,000 in 2025, and Ramadan set the single-day record at roughly 48,000; a single post-Hajj window moved 1.2 million passengers on 3,310 trips.
The Foster + Partners stations are sized for the spikes: up to 20,000 passengers per hour at peak, with the architecture designed to scale from an anticipated 60 million to 135 million passengers a year.
The city’s own metro — long planned, designed by Foster + Partners to interlock with the HSR stations — is the missing urban layer; the airport’s 45-to-80-million expansion assumes it. A Jeddah–Riyadh land-bridge line is the declared next national corridor.
Most high-speed railways sell time; the Haramain sells certainty — the certainty of reaching a sanctuary on a date that cannot move. That is why its stations are cathedrals of throughput and why Jeddah, sitting on the hinge, monetises the flow twice: once at the airport, once on the rails.
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