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While Saudi Arabia and Qatar close a 300-kilometer-per-hour high-speed train to connect the capitals in a few years, Brazil, with continental dimensions and a dire need for tracks, is still at the stage of auctioning the first freight railways that actually promise to materialize.
There are comparisons that hurt because they expose a difficult-to-explain delay. On the other side of the world, two Gulf countries signed a project to cross hundreds of kilometers of desert at 300 kilometers per hour, with operation expected to start very soon. Here, Brazil, which needs railways as much as it needs food, continues to struggle to get off the ground corridors discussed for decades.
And we’re not even talking about the same thing. The Gulf plans a passenger bullet train, the luxury of railway engineering. Brazil is still fighting to deliver the basics, freight railways to transport grain and ore, the simplest and most essential type of work that exists. Even at this elementary level, we drag projects for twenty, thirty, forty years.
The gap is not about money, it’s about continuity
The easy explanation would be to say that the Gulf has oil and therefore builds quickly. But money alone doesn’t build railways. What builds is continuous political will, a plan that doesn’t change with each election, and the willingness to support a project that only shows results many years after it starts. And that’s exactly where Brazil stumbles, in a cycle where each government redoes or abandons what the previous one started.
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Transnordestina sets record by installing 1.69 km of tracks in a single day, reaches 81% completion, and plans to deliver an additional 100 km of railway by the end of June 2026.
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I confess that this is the part that bothers me the most in our eternal railway saga. There’s no lack of projects, no lack of engineers, not even a lack of need. What lacks is the consistency to carry out a project from start to finish without it becoming a hostage to political disputes, changes in command, or budget constraints along the way. A stalled railway rots, becomes more expensive, and discourages any investor.
Projects that Brazilians grew up hearing about
Think of the names that have become almost a joke because they take so long. The Transnordestina, started back in 2006, is only now reaching the final stretch. The Ferrogrão, stalled for five years in a legal dispute, has barely been cleared. These are projects that an entire generation of Brazilians grew up hearing promises about without ever seeing them completed, and that only now show concrete signs of progress, after surviving everything that could have killed them.
The country announced an ambitious plan to unlock a wave of railways in the coming years, with investments totaling hundreds of billions of reais. It’s good news, no doubt. But it’s impossible not to notice the difference in pace, while we celebrate finally auctioning and unlocking, others are already signing, building, and inaugurating, in a time frame that here would barely be enough to complete studies.
The invisible cost of slowness
This slowness has a price that no one sees in the account, but that the country pays every day. Without enough railways, Brazil transports a large part of its production by road, at a very high freight cost that erodes the competitiveness of agribusiness and makes everything transported more expensive. Each year of delay in a railway is another year of too many trucks, destroyed roads, and profit leaking through the drain of expensive transportation.
It’s one of those silent delays that don’t make headlines but weigh on the entire economy. While smaller countries with less land build modern railway networks, Brazil, one of the largest agricultural producers on the planet, remains too dependent on asphalt. We export as giants and transport as if we were small, and this contradiction costs billions every harvest.
And it’s not that Brazil has never tried. The country once had a respectable railway network in the past, which was dismantled over the last century in favor of highways. More recently, projects like the famous bullet train between Rio and São Paulo were announced with pomp, studied, budgeted, and simply shelved, becoming a symbol of promises that don’t come to fruition. Each of these frustrated restarts was costly and left the feeling that we know how to dream big but stumble when it comes to turning the dream into tracks laid on the ground. Meanwhile, countries that started from scratch, with no railway tradition, have surpassed Brazil and now display modern networks that we only see in photos. It’s a delay that can’t be explained by a lack of technical capacity, because Brazilian engineers design and build railways worldwide.
The mirror the world offers
I don’t bring this comparison to belittle Brazil, but to measure what is possible when a country truly decides to prioritize infrastructure. The Gulf shows that a giant project can be completed quickly when there is a firm plan and continuity. The message is not that there is a lack of money here, but that there is a lack of treating railways as state policy, above mandates and temporary disputes.
The good news is that something finally seems to be moving, with the Transnordestina in the final stretch and the Ferrogrão unlocked. Perhaps we are finally learning the lesson that the rest of the world already practices. But for now, we still watch from afar while others cut ribbons of trains crossing deserts at the speed that our bureaucracy takes just to start discussing, and this difference in pace is the real distance between us and them.
Why is it that Brazil, so large and so productive, still hasn’t managed to truly prioritize railways?
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