Ashdod's Ad Halom Station Gets a NIS 28 Million Rebuild

Israel's Ministry of Transportation and Israel Railways have begun a NIS 28 million upgrade of the Ashdod Ad Halom train station, expanding the passenger hall and the entrance plaza and overhauling the station's infrastructure. The work is due to be completed in the first quarter of 2028.

The station serves Ashdod, a city on the Mediterranean coast south of Tel Aviv, and sits at Ad Halom near the city's south-eastern entrance. It reopened in 1995 and was electrified in February 2021; by 2019 it ranked eighth of Israel's 68 stations by passenger volume, with about 3.76 million travellers a year. Ashdod is also home to Israel's largest container port, which makes the corridor between the city and the centre of the country a heavily used one.

What the money buys

The passenger hall is to be expanded to roughly 215 square metres, with additional ticket gates (rendered in the statement's translation as "carousels"), inspection stations and a larger ticket counter area, all aimed at easing the flow of people entering and leaving the station. The cafeteria area is to be enlarged and given a covered outdoor section with new benches and seating.

The station is also to gain an additional protected space of about 40 square metres at its southern end, with direct and rapid access from the platforms. Protected spaces are the reinforced rooms Israeli public buildings provide as shelter from rocket and missile fragments. Alongside that, the existing infrastructure is being overhauled, including fire safety systems and electrical works, with extra restrooms added. The ministry said the upgrades are being carried out with an emphasis on the most advanced accessibility features.

Why now: a network running at record load

The upgrade is framed against demand. Approximately 72 million journeys were made on Israel Railways in 2025, which the ministry described as a record year, and demand at Ashdod Ad Halom is expected to grow by a further million passengers in the coming years.

That is the end point of a long climb. Israel's rail network carried around 2.5 million passengers a year in 1990 and about 69 million in 2019, on the standard published figures, across a network of some 1,511 kilometres of standard-gauge track as of 2022, with a phased electrification programme running since 2010. Growth of that speed puts the strain on stations and platforms rather than on track.

The system is not without argument about how it should be run. Ynetnews has reported that the Finance Ministry wants day-to-day train operations transferred to private contractors by 2029, with the state retaining ownership of the infrastructure, a proposal opposed by the Transport Ministry and the Histadrut labour federation.

Part of a wider station programme

Ashdod Ad Halom is one of several stations being reworked. Israel Railways said it completed upgrades at Beit Yehoshua, Beit Shemesh and Rehovot over the past year and is working on Caesarea-Pardes Hanna, Beer Yaakov and others.

The Minister of Transportation and Road Safety, Brigadier General (Res.) Miri Regev, put the project in that frame: "We continue to invest in infrastructure that connects the citizens of Israel to centers of employment, education, and leisure from the center to the south. The upgrade of Ashdod Ad Halom station is part of a comprehensive vision to strengthen the railway as a transportation backbone, while improving the travel experience, increasing capacity, and preparing for growing demands."

The ministry's director general, Moshe Ben Zaken, made the operational argument: "The continuous growth in the number of train passengers requires us to undertake extensive infrastructural preparation, not just adding trains." The chairman of Israel Railways' board, Moshe Shimoni, described the work as combining infrastructure development with service improvement, and the acting chief executive, Avshalom Elmaliach, said that alongside the station upgrade the company was adding approximately 40,000 seats on trains, running longer trains and expanding operating hours.

What the announcement did not say

The statement did not give a current passenger figure for Ashdod Ad Halom, so the promised extra million is not set against a base. It did not say how services will be affected while the work is under way, or whether platforms (as opposed to the concourse) are being lengthened or widened. Nor did it break the NIS 28 million down between the passenger hall, the protected space and the infrastructure works.