On the rails - Oman gets rolling

Today, the Tender Board finally announced that it was tendering for Project Management consultancy services (121/2010) and Design & Supervision consultancy services (120/2010) for National Railway projects here in Oman. The owning organisation is the Supreme Committee for Town Planning. Interesting!

The floats were picked up by Arabian Business here.


The ambitious plan is to 3 launch Construction tenders in 2012 and to complete all three legs of the work concurrently by 2017. I say ambitious because there's an awful lot of pre-contract work that's going to need to take place in order to get this monster done.

An excellent move, and part of a GCC wide initiative for a regional railway network.

The railway will certainly do a lot for building the economy of Oman away from Muscat. I don't know the route yet (but if you do, please do email me!), but I should imagine that I'd be buying up as much real estate as I could around the planned station towns :)

le fin.