Rayan Al-Harbi has been the operations and maintenance director of the Haramain High-Speed Railway (HHR) since December 2018.
Recently, Al-Harbi said that the train service’s capacity would increase to more than 150,000 pilgrims starting from the 10th of Dul Hijjah.
Al-Harbi said that the Haramain railway is one of the largest express transportation projects in the world. The length of the power lines on the train tracks is up to 12,000 km and connected to six giant power generators.
Al-Harbi holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, and graduated in 2008. He received a principle of railway operation license from Technische Universitat Dresden in 2010. He has also been a certified rail incident officer (RIO) since 2018.
His career with the Saudi Railway Co. (SAR) began in 2009 as a signaling and telecommunication (S&T) resident engineer where he supervised S&T construction at Hail.
In 2013, Al-Harbi was promoted to S&T maintenance supervisor and a year later he became supervisor of the operations control center, where he provided leadership to the chiefs and train controllers and participated in developing a new rule book for SAR.
By 2016, he was officially settled in Riyadh as operations control center manager until he was promoted to head the HHR in 2017 to lead delivery of service demonstration during the soft opening. After becoming HHR director in 2018 his responsibilities have included overseeing train operations, maintenance and infrastructure, as well as marketing.
