Kuwait is the last Gulf capital without a single passenger rail kilometre — but the 111-km GCC component entered detailed design in 2025, and a 160-km, four-line metro for the capital is back on the table.
Kuwait runs no passenger rail of any kind — no intercity trains, no commuter lines, no metro — and roughly 99% of all movement in the country happens by car. The capital's earlier metro project spent years in planning before being formally cancelled in 2023; the replacement plan now on the table is bigger: a 160-kilometer network of 68 stations in five phases, with Phase One covering a 50-km corridor and 27 stations, a third of it underground.
The four lines are drawn around the city's real geography: Line 1 (23.7 km, 19 stations) ties the southern suburbs to the center and the university; Line 2 (21 km, 27 stations) links the business district with Salmiya and Hawally; Line 4 (22.7 km, 15 stations) runs from the center through the Shuwaikh industrial zone to the airport — the line visitors would use first. Feeder buses are meant to be re-planned around the stations.
The Kuwait National Rail Road is the flagship: a planned 575-km mainline network for mixed passenger and freight traffic, passenger trains at 200 km/h, freight at 120. Its first piece is the 111-km GCC component toward the Saudi border — the Kuwaiti link in the roughly 2,177-km GCC Railway meant to run from Kuwait City to Muscat — whose study and detailed design agreement was signed on 7 April 2025, with design work starting 6 May 2025.
The concept design stage was approved on 28 September 2025, and the CAPEX/OPEX analysis and detailed design phases are underway — a roughly twelve-month design period before construction tenders. Kuwait's track record argues for patience; the GCC Railway's 2030 target has slipped before. But the direction is set: the region's holdout is drawing its rails.
Our read: plan Kuwait as a car-and-bus city, because that is what it is — the railway is a design contract, not a service, and no opening date exists for either the KNRR or the metro. What you can ride today is the Sheikh Jaber Causeway: 34.1 km over the sea, a world record, 20 minutes where the bay used to take 70 — drive it at dusk and you've seen Kuwait's engineering ambition in finished form. When Line 4 to the airport eventually breaks ground, this page changes; until then, the X3 airport express is your 'rail' link.
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