SAN DIEGO: Saudi Arabia is embarking on a number of vast projects, including NEOM, the Line and the Red Sea Islands development.

And all are being hailed for their qualities aimed at making them sustainable, not just financially, but also environmentally.

In order for any of these projects to work, however, people must be able to reach them, which in itself presents challenges — railways need to cross vast areas of desert, sand moves, and dry wadi beds do not remain dry for long when a storm hits.

On the sidelines of the recent Autodesk University 2024: The Design and Make Conference in San Diego, US, Egis Group civil engineer Joao Guilherme Alves Correa spoke to Arab News about the many challenges involved in working on the ambitious transport network project that will link these various destinations.

“The environment in the Middle East keeps changing every day, every week. It is difficult to define the alignment of the corridor of the railway because there are new investments everywhere — new buildings, new infrastructures. It is complicated to incorporate all those things into the design,” he said.

He did not specify which of Saudi Arabia’s railway projects he was working on, citing confidentiality.

But currently underway or at least in the planning stages are passenger and freight services crossing hundreds of kilometers through the desert, costing billions of dollars.

The Saudi Landbridge Project will link Riyadh, Jeddah and the Red Sea project, as well as NEOM, covering nearly 1,000 km at a cost of $7 billion according to the business news website meed.com.

Work is currently scheduled to start in 2025.

Creating the Saudi rail network is uncharted territory; such a far-reaching transport network is unprecedented in the Kingdom.

“We needed to get a lot of statistical information at the beginning of the project, including the impact of weather on the area and the project,” Alves explained.

“There are wadis that you need to consider when creating a railway in the middle of the desert. It is not so simple, there is a lot of environmental stuff.”

The Gulf region is reputed for splashing out on its megaprojects, but Alves said clients are not simply settling for the biggest, most expensive projects.

“They are less conservative socially and more conservative when it comes to business and spending money,” he said.

“The client always asks us to create benchmarks of different solutions to find the most economical solutions and we need to do this with every aspect of the design whether that’s a bridge, tunnel or the railway track — it’s everywhere. I think that they (Gulf countries) are far more conservative when it comes to spending money.”

Asked whether he would consider working again with the Gulf, he said without hesitation: “I would definitely work with Gulf countries again — the investments are there, the bigger projects are there.”

Since 2021, Alves has been working on various rail projects in the region and praised the working practices.

“In that time, there has been a mix of men and women in the leading positions. In fact, I can say it is more or less the same as what we have in Europe and America,” he said.