The Al-Haramain High Speed Rail project is every bit as important as it is ambitious. It will link the holy cities of Madinah and Makkah via the King Abdullah Economic City in Rabigh and Jeddah with a spur to the King Abdulaziz International Airport. At Jeddah, it will also connect to the new national rail network.

When it is completed, the 453-kilometer line will be carrying 50 million people a year. It will be key contributor to the latest improvements in the Haj and Umrah projects.

Unfortunately, the operative word is “when”. Work on the Al-Haramain project, which began in 2009, was due to have been completed by 2012. It was acknowledged from the outset that this deadline was ambitious. But the contractors and project managers who took on these major and complex works, originally budgeted to cost just under $10 billion, accepted the timing as readily as they accepted the advance payments for their efforts.

All major civil engineering projects carry a significant risk of over-running their timetable and indeed their budgets. But it does not have to be that way. Many major undertakings are delivered on time and on price. For instance, the intricate underground works of the Crossrail project in London are actually slightly ahead of schedule. Despite unexpected challenges, they are almost within budget.

Unfortunately, by contrast, our Al-Haramain High Speed Rail project is woefully behind schedule. It will be next year before even part of the railway starts operating. As of this summer it was being said that the Madinah to Rabigh section will be operating by the end of 2015. This means that the entire project is running more than three years over time.

This is frankly not good enough. It must be accepted that there may be good reasons for some delays. Nevertheless, to be delivering a project scheduled for just three years, at least six years later represents a substantial failure. Something has clearly gone wrong. Many contractors from around the globe are involved in the intricate planning and execution of this major engineering exercise. It can be expected that fingers of blame will be pointing in multiple directions. That blame-game is likely to be all the more urgent since the contracts almost certainly carry penalty clauses for late delivery.

While such clauses may seem the height of good sense when the deals are being drafted, it has been proven time and again on civil engineering projects around the world, that whenever things start to go seriously wrong, a stage can be reached when contractors start to look at their bottom line. They realize that what seemed to be a lucrative deal is in fact going to cost them a fortune. If a project seems unrecoverable, the point can be reached where it is cheaper cut back drastically on the effort to actually fix the problems and complete the agreed work. It may even be less expensive to walk away and leave the consequences to be fought over by rival teams of lawyers.

It must be hoped that nothing like this is going to happen with the Al-Haramain rail project. The minister of transport and chairman of the board of Saudi Railways, Abdullah Al-Muqbel has just completed an unannounced series of visits to different parts of the whole project.

It seems clear that he was not impressed with what he found. He has demanded that by February, the contractors submit a clear plan as to how they are going to clear the backlog of works and drive the project ahead.

The minister is absolutely right to be seizing this project by the neck and shaking some rigor into it. This railway is destined to change the face of the Kingdom. Its success will underpin the creation of the national rail network with its important links to other GCC states. It will also inspire work of Riyadh’s highly ambitious mass-transit rail and bus system and the mirror scheme planned for Jeddah. The economic opportunities that the Al-Haramain and its sister rail projects will produce are immense. The economic impact promises to be far-reaching. The new rail network will underpin the growth of the Kingdom’s diversification toward a nonoil economy. The existence of fast and efficient rail links across the country will also stem the move from rural areas to the city. It will support and boost the rural economy and diminish the very real pressures that are being felt by urbanization.

Therefore it is crystal clear that the challenges facing the Al-Haramain project need to be sorted out, as a matter of the highest priority.