The seed of rail transport was planted in Jordan yesterday… but seeds do not grow alone, so will we water it for it to grow tomorrow?
Jordan and the UAE, today Wednesday, signed agreements to start implementing the Aqaba Port railway project, one of the largest transport projects in Jordan in 25 years, with a joint Jordanian-Emirati investment, in a strategic move reflecting the level of economic partnership between the two countries.
The project aims to enhance the Kingdom's position as a regional center for transport and logistics services, by connecting the phosphate and potash mines to the industrial port in Aqaba Port, which contributes to facilitating the movement of goods and reducing transport costs and increasing the efficiency of supply chains.
However, reading this project as only a railway line is an incomplete view. Major transport projects are not measured by their length in kilometers, but by their ability to reshape the economic geography. The real question here is not: How do we transport goods to Aqaba? But: Where should economic activities settle after their arrival?
In urban planning, the port is not just seen as a facility, but as a driver for redistributing development. And if Aqaba remains the endpoint for everything, we are simply reproducing the same congestion more efficiently, nothing more.
This challenge becomes clearer in the Jordanian case, where the geography does not allow Aqaba to transform into an open storage center. It is surrounded by rugged mountain ranges and is restricted by a coastal strip that does not exceed 27 kilometers, crowded with port, tourism, and service uses. Therefore, thinking of expanding its functions within its borders is a thought that collides with reality before succeeding on paper. Hence, an inland port becomes not just a logistical option, but a planning necessity.
In this context, the Ma'an Inland Port project emerges as one of the projects most in line with this vision. The location designated for it, adjacent to the Ma'an Industrial City, forms a convergence point between industry and transport, within a vision we have been working on since the city's design in 1998 through the Royal Scientific Society.
This city, prepared to attract heavy and petrochemical industries, and with about two thousand dunum of serviced land available, needs not just a road connecting it to the port, but a rail entering it. Here the equation shifts from transporting goods to redefining production.
In advanced industrial models, the rail does not stop at the port boundaries, but extends into the factories. When this happens, not only do transport costs decrease, but the entire structure of industrial costs changes, and logistics become part of the production process.
We contributed to preparing the preliminary designs for the Ma'an Inland Port in 2017 on behalf of the Aqaba Development Corporation, but the absence of a modern railway at that time limited its feasibility, given the reliance on the narrow-gauge Aqaba railway (1.1 meters).
However, today, with the establishment of the Emirates-Jordan Railway Company, this equation changes. The infrastructure that was missing is now under implementation, reviving the project as a central element in the system.
The benefits of the inland port extend beyond its spatial aspects to being an integrated system for managing the movement of goods. It acts as a temporary station to organize the flow instead of congesting it, connecting with the national and international road network and the railways within a multimodal transport system, and is implementable in phases according to demand evolution within a flexible comprehensive plan.
The port also contributes to transferring an increasing part of the burdens of the Aqaba port system inland, reaching the possibility of performing customs clearance in Ma'an instead of Aqaba, through an integrated customs center with extended powers. It also enhances electronic connectivity with ports, through modern systems like the "national window", improving operations' efficiency and reducing time and costs.
The port also functions as a pivotal station for redistributing goods towards the border centers with neighboring countries, such as Al Omari, Al Karamah, Jaber, and Al Durra, in addition to the bridges with the West Bank, as well as the development and industrial areas within the Kingdom, enhancing Jordan's role as a regional logistical corridor.
Among the advanced operational ideas, goods are moved from Aqaba to Ma'an under a "load manifest" without customs inspection in Aqaba, where they are delivered at the inland port as the first point of receipt, supported by advanced management systems and coordination with navigation agents. Here we must shift thinking from a project to a network, and from a facility to a system.
In this framework, the most important aspect emerges: the role of the Ma'an Development Area as a growth center, functionally linked with both Aqaba and Madounah, to form a logistical triangle redistributing economic activities within the Kingdom.
This logistical triangle does not operate in isolation from others, but integrates with a tourism triangle that connects Aqaba, Wadi Rum, and Petra. Here we transition from thinking about projects to thinking about systems, where a matrix of functional triangles grows and expands to transform into interconnected clusters, each enhancing the other.
And the impact of this transformation is not limited to logistics and economics, but extends to the population structure and its distribution across the Kingdom. Enhancing Ma'an's role as a growth center could help alleviate pressure on the capital, Amman, where Ma'an's share of the population could rise from about 2% of the total to nearly 5% or more, in parallel with the growth of Aqaba to reach up to 10% of the population.
Especially since the area has seen investment in recent years in building an integrated developmental base, through the establishment of Al-Hussein Bin Talal University, alongside major projects for exploiting solar energy, benefiting from Ma'an's location within one of the world's highest solar belts, and its richness in groundwater due to its location within the Disi Aquifer.
This transformation is not just read as population figures, but as an indicator of the success of redistribution of development policies, and the enhancement of the principle of balanced development, which Jordanian governments have long sought, now with more effective tools available than ever.
The agreements have been signed, and the partners are serious about moving towards financial closure and completing the designs. But the real challenge is no longer in execution, but in expanding the vision.
If we want this train to carry more than phosphate and potash, we need to extend its tracks to industrial cities, urban centers, and border crossings. Only then, we will not have just built a railway… but reshaped Jordan's economic map.
