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Chaos greeted commuters on Monday morning after an infrastructure failure disrupted morning train services on the main line.
Travelers on both sides of the Jerusalem-Herzliya line – which stops at all train stations in Tel Aviv – were forced to disembark from Ben Gurion Airport and transfer to alternative trains.
After hours of delays during rush hour, Israel Railways has updated travelers that the fault has been fixed and service is slowly returning to normal.
The disruption to the service comes after a week of closure of the busy Tel Aviv-Haifa railway line for scheduled maintenance, causing heavy traffic on the coastal road between the cities.
Regarding the schedule of Tel Aviv-Haifa disruptions, Israel Railways manager Ehiel Tovol said to Kan Public Broadcasting on Monday that the winter was chosen deliberately because it would be less disruptive.
“According to the plan, it will take a week. There is no good time to close, but this is the time when there are very few passengers and it is cost-effective to build public transport,” he said.
Work to further connect the coastal line, which passes through towns such as Petah Tikva, Kfar Saba and Ra’anana, to the east is said to have started on Sunday and will be completed on Saturday.
A descriptive photo of a train at Yitzhak Navon train station in Jerusalem, May 11, 2020.
During that time, northbound trains stop at Herzliya or Netanya, while southbound trains from Nahariya stop at Binyamin. There will be a shuttle service to make up for the missing train legs.
Despite the disruptions, the new “Derech Shave”, which was inaugurated by the Minister of Transport Merav Michael on Monday, marked the beginning of the reconstruction of public transport.
The new system offers a new nationwide pass that gives users unlimited access to public transportation throughout the country for 225 shekels ($65) per month. Those over the age of 75 can travel for free, and pensioners under that age are entitled to a 50% discount on all tickets.
The program is aimed at decongesting the closed road network and encouraging the use of public transport.
The population density in the center of the country, the slowness of the public transport system and the speed of road construction mean that the car ownership rate in Israel is low compared to others, but the traffic flow is 3.5 times worse than the OECD average. Developed countries.
The Israel Times staff contributed to this report.
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