After traffic snarls, Tel Aviv train station to reopen early

Tel Aviv’s Hashalom train station will reopen on Thursday after being closed to allow for construction to take place on the city’s new light rail line, three days earlier than planned.

The decision to reopen the station was made by Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz (Likud), following an evaluation of the progress of the construction work by Israel Railways, according to Hebrew media reports.

The train station, which was closed at midnight Sunday, was not scheduled to open again until March 12, but after drilling work on the light rail line was found to be ahead of schedule the reopening of the station was moved up to Thursday.

The news will likely come as welcome relief to commuters, who have been forced to traverse roads jam-packed with cars and buses since the station closed down.

Engineers working on the project had determined Hashalom station needed to be closed during the current phase of the project, as it was unsafe to allow trains to continue to pass through the train station while a tunnel-boring machine was operating underneath it.

The Red Line of the light rail will be the first line of Tel Aviv’s light-rail system, and will eventually run from Petah Tikva to Bat Yam, traveling underneath the Hashalom station.

Construction is set to be completed by 2021, after which the light rail will run from the Em Hamoshavot neighborhood in Petah Tikva to Herzl Street in Tel Aviv.

In May 2015, the China Railway Tunnel Group won a bid of close to NIS 3 billion ($810 million) to help build the long-awaited light rail in Tel Aviv.

CRTG is a subsidiary of CREC, China’s largest construction company, which has business ties with Iran’s Khatam-al Anbiya Construction company worth billions. The company announced a high-speed rail project earlier this year connecting Tehran and Isfahan.