The 57 km.-long electrified railway link was first approved in 2001 and originally scheduled to open in 2008.
The long-awaited high-speed railway connecting Jerusalem and Tel Aviv welcomed its first passengers on Saturday evening, more than a decade later than first planned.
The first direct train departed Tel Aviv’s Hahagana Station at 9:56 p.m., arriving at Jerusalem Yitzhak Navon Station 34 minutes later. The first direct train from Jerusalem left also at 9:56 p.m., arriving in Tel Aviv at 10:28 p.m.
The 57 km.-long electrified railway link was first approved in June 2001 by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and originally scheduled to open in 2008.
A railway connecting Jerusalem and the city of Jaffa was first built at the time of the Ottoman Empire in 1892 – 17 years before the founding of Tel Aviv in 1909.
The line was later operated by the British authorities and, starting from 1949, by the Israeli Railways.
The last train between the country’s two largest cities ran in 2017.
Since then, passengers who wanted to travel between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv by train needed to transfer at Beit Shemesh; a journey that took over an hour and half to cover 50-something kilometers, with a mere one train per hour departing from the outlying Malcha station in Jerusalem.
In September 2018, the partially completed railway from Jerusalem to Ben-Gurion was inaugurated.
Since then, passengers opting to travel by rail between the cities have been required to change trains at the airport, experiencing persistent malfunctions and breakdowns.
Trains travelling in both directions will now run every 30 minutes from Sunday to Thursday, and stop at Ben-Gurion Airport en route to their final destination. Trains will operate from about 6:20 a.m. until 9:30 p.m. on weekdays, and two trains will run in each direction on Saturday evenings. A single ticket costs NIS 22.
The project, which has required the construction of nine bridges and five tunnels, is estimated to cost a total of NIS 7 billion, more than double its original NIS 2.8b. estimate.
As reported by The Jerusalem Post