On June 9, Türkiye’s Transport and Infrastructure Minister Abdulkadir Uraloğlu signed a memorandum of understanding with his Saudi counterpart Saleh Bin Nasser al-Jasser to revive a rail line tracing the legendary Hejaz Railway. The project reflects a bid to open up route diversity for regional and global trade at a moment when the Middle East’s connectivity has spent three straight years lurching from one instability to the next, especially in the post-October 7 regional context.
A route with meaningful historical legacy
The original Hejaz Railway, launched under Sultan Abdulhamid II, was never just infrastructure. It was a strategy designed to strengthen the Ottoman Empire’s ties to the Arabian Peninsula. The line drew fierce opposition from Britain and France, who ran smear campaigns and stoked separatist revolts against it. Their objection wasn’t subtle. A more connected Arabian Peninsula threatened their long-term imperial and exploitative designs on oil and trade routes, which they intended to control themselves.
Why now: a chokepoint problem with no easy fix
Beyond its symbolic resonance, the modern Hejaz Railway project reflects Türkiye’s vision for Gulf connectivity at a genuinely precarious moment. The war involving Iran has turned the Strait of Hormuz into a flashpoint, and that’s not a peripheral concern; it’s the artery. Around 25% of the world’s seaborne oil trade transits the Strait, with options to bypass it strictly limited, and total flows have averaged roughly 20 million barrels a day, representing about a fifth of global petroleum consumption. The dependency is heavily Asian. Roughly 84% of the crude oil and condensate exiting the Strait of Hormuz heads to Asian markets overall, with China and India alone absorbing approximately 44% of all Hormuz crude exports in 2025. Existing bypass infrastructure cannot completely replace the strait, however. Saudi Arabia’s East-West Pipeline and the UAE’s ADCOP pipeline, even at full theoretical capacity, could together handle only 3.5 to 5.5 million barrels a day, covering barely a quarter of what normally moves through Hormuz, while Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, and Iran have essentially no pipeline bypass at all.
That asymmetry is exactly why land-based alternatives matter, even partial ones. It is important, however, not to overstate rail infrastructure’s substitutive capacity. Even a fully operational Hejaz corridor would not replicate the energy-export volumes currently flowing through Hormuz. Its strategic value lies elsewhere: in reducing the single-point-of-failure risk, enhancing redundancy, diversifying logistics routes, facilitating trade, and mitigating the economic consequences of temporary maritime disruptions. In this sense, the railway should be understood less as an alternative to Hormuz itself and more as part of a broader resilience architecture designed to reduce dependence on any single chokepoint.
Türkiye’s connectivity vision at play
This is where Türkiye’s positioning becomes interesting. Between the Development Road project and now the Hejaz Railway, Türkiye is emerging as a lead architect of alternative connectivity in the region, not just a participant. The proposed line would run in two segments, starting in Türkiye and threading through Syria and Jordan before reaching Saudi Arabia and eventually Oman. That routing would deepen intra-Gulf connectivity and dovetail with Saudi Arabia’s own diversification efforts, including its East-West pipeline, while giving Türkiye a stronger diplomatic hand to defend the joint ventures it’s backing. Commercially and touristically, a revived Hejaz line signals a new kind of post-war dynamism for the region.
Modern Hejaz Route
Rather than retracing the historic line stone for stone, the modern project follows a parallel corridor designed to serve intra-regional trade and logistics flow. The first phase would connect Türkiye to Aleppo; from there, an Aleppo–Damascus–Jordan link already exists, and talks with Saudi Arabia are ongoing. The end goal is to extend the line all the way to Oman, reaching the open ocean and giving the region a genuine alternative to Hormuz.
Jordan’s role here is pivotal as its Red Sea port of Aqaba offers a direct link to Bab-el-Mandeb, another chokepoint that’s become impossible to ignore. In 2024 and early 2025, about 20% of global LNG trade, mostly from Qatar, also passed through Hormuz, and Qatar alone is the world’s second-largest LNG exporter, with almost all of its exports transiting the strait. That means the railway cannot be designed in isolation. A parallel pipeline corridor, sized to current reserve-to-production ratios (R/P) and rising demand, needs to accompany it.
The demand side matters just as much. Asia remains the Gulf’s most important oil customer, with China’s appetite the single biggest variable. How fast it moves toward renewables, and whether that shift actually reaches heavy industry, will shape how much this corridor is ultimately worth. On the European side, the Russia-Ukraine war has already reshaped energy security thinking, and Europe’s growing reliance on Qatari LNG for diversification will likewise influence how much weight both the Hejaz Railway and the Development Road end up carrying. In short, geopolitics isn’t just a backdrop here. It’s actively shaping how connectivity evolves.
The bigger lesson
More broadly, the renewed interest in projects such as the Hejaz Railway reflects a gradual transformation in how regional influence is exercised. For decades, Middle Eastern geopolitics was largely defined through military competition, territorial disputes, and security alignments. Increasingly, however, influence is also being measured through the ability to shape trade corridors, transport networks, energy routes, and patterns of economic interdependence. Connectivity is becoming a strategic asset in its own right.
The Hejaz Railway is, at its core, a bet that political will can open a critical artery. Recent events around the Red Sea and Hormuz have made one thing clear: economies that depend on a single route inherit that route’s vulnerabilities. With Israeli expansionism still largely unchecked, and the recent Iran-U.S. ceasefire might offer short-term calm rather than a durable settlement, turning to alternatives isn’t optional but a necessity. As the connective tissue for goods, services, and people, projects like this one will remain central to how the Gulf navigates its next chapter, anchored in cooperation and the kind of multilateral diplomacy that gives such ventures their staying power.
