On this day in 2009, the Dubai Metro was inaugurated, the first urban rail network on the Arabian Peninsula. The ceremony was timed for nine minutes and nine seconds past nine in the evening, on the ninth day of the ninth month of the ninth year. A signalman spends his life trying to make a clock behave, so I take my hat off to whoever proposed that and to whoever then had to deliver it.
It helps, I concede, that the trains are driverless. No cab, no driver to hold at a red, nobody's tea going cold on a platform end. The Red Line opened first, ten stations at the start of it, with the Green Line following a year or so later. A third line, the Blue, is due in 2029, and a Gold Line was announced only this April for 2032. The peninsula went from no urban railway at all to a network with a colour scheme.
Driverless does not mean unstaffed, mind. The human part was done by the people on the concourses that first night: showing passengers which side the doors opened, explaining the fare card, standing where a nervous first-time rider could see a uniform and feel better about it. Automation runs the train. Somebody still has to run the welcome. The Wikipedia article is linked below if you want the line map.
Here's the clever bit, Harold: the signalling talks to each train continuously, so it always knows how far it may safely run before it must stop, and that moving envelope shrinks the gap between trains far below what a fixed red lamp allows. The control room staff mostly watch a wall of green and wait for the day it isn't.
Harold, the engineering brief there is brutal: Dubai summer afternoons sit around 40 to 45 degrees, and the stations are sealed and cooled with platform screen doors so the conditioned air stays where it is paid for. Even the footbridges and some bus shelters were air-conditioned. Building a railway is one thing; building a cold tube through a desert is another.