page_title: Rail transport in Israel
section_title: Passenger traffic
hierarchical_section_title: Rail transport in Israel / Passenger traffic
caption_attribution_description: Shalom railway station, Tel Aviv
context_page_description: Rail transport in Israel includes heavy rail as well as light rail. Excluding light rail, the network consists of 1,384 kilometers of track, and is undergoing constant expansion. All of the lines are standard gauge and as of 2016 the heavy rail network is in the initial stages of an electrification programme. A government owned company, Israel Railways, manages the entire heavy rail network. Most of the network is located on the densely populated coastal plain. The only light rail line in Israel is the Jerusalem Light Rail, though another line in Tel Aviv is currently under construction.
  Many of the rail routes in Israel date back to before the establishment of the state – to the days of the British Mandate for Palestine and earlier. Rail infrastructure was considered less important than road infrastructure during the state's early years, and except for the construction of the coastal railway in the early 1950s, the network saw little investment until the late 1980s. In 1993, a rail connection was opened between the coastal railway from the north and southern lines through Tel Aviv.
context_section_description: Following the low point of 2.5 million passengers in 1990, the extensive investments in the national heavy rail infrastructure beginning in the early to mid-1990s made train travel more appealing, especially given the ever-increasing road congestion, and consequently passenger rail use began rising rapidly—by a factor of about fivefold over any given ten-year span during the 1990s and 2000s. Consequently, in the 25-year span between 1990 and 2015, heavy rail passenger traffic grew over 20-times. Moreover, with several large-scale railway infrastructure projects still underway and more planned in the future, the growth in passenger numbers is expected to continue.
caption: Tel Aviv HaShalom, one of the most recognizable railway stations in Israel
exif: {"Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "180", "Image YResolution": "180", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS Windows", "Image DateTime": "2006:10:08 20:59:18", "Image ExifOffset": "164", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "302", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "5096", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "700", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "498"}