At an investment of NIS 70 million, Israel Railways is expanding the HaShalom and Savidor Center stations in Tel Aviv.
Tens of thousands of passengers travel daily through HaShalom and Savidor-Center stations, which are considered the most heavily used in the country.
(Credit: Nitzan Dror)
Construction is already underway at Savidor-Center Station to build an additional terminal on Ramat Gan’s Moda’i Bridge to which the train platforms will be extended. The project is expected to be completed in November 2017.
At HaShalom Station, an additional terminal that is also under construction is scheduled to open in October 2019, south of Derech HaShalom. It will be possible to exit and enter the station on the other side of the road, which is expected to reduce the congestion at the railway station through about 55 thousand passengers pass daily.
As part of construction at HaShalom at the end of August this year, Ayalon Highway closed in both directions during the weekend, and a political crisis erupted around the maintenance work taking place on Shabbat .Since Israel Railways has received approval for the Shabbat construction, no delay is expected in the project.
The HaShalom project costs NIS 50 million. In 2015, Israel Railways announced that it planned to HaShalom Station at a cost of NIS 17 million, but later said that that was only for the first stage of the upgrade.
The Savidor-Center station currently has two terminals: one in Tel Aviv at the Arlozorov terminal and the other at the Diamond Exchange complex in Ramat Gan. The new terminal on Moda’i Bridge will be a third. About 55,000 passengers pass daily through Savidor-Center station. The cost of the project is NIS 32 million.
The upgrade was done on the basis of a study commissioned by the railway, which showed that 70 percent of the public that commutes to work by train alights at Tel Aviv stations. As a result, the crowds are especially dense with passengers’ arrival in the morning and departures in the evening. Passenger flow routes were analyzed to identify bottlenecks and overly long lines.
According to Israel Railways, the expansion of the stations is also part of the company’s preparations to receive the first electric train line in Israel that will travel between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. The Ministry of Transport has promised that it will be operational by Passover next year, which begins on March 30. The deployment also includes extensive infrastructure work on the tracks to adapt them to electricity and the new signaling system that will be operational in the coming years.
(Translated and edited by J. Herzog)