Excluding light rail, the network consists of 1,511 kilometers (939 mi) of track, and is undergoing constant expansion.

All of the lines are standard gauge and as of 2023[update] approximately one-fifth of the heavy rail network is electrified, with additional electrification work underway.

Some of the rail routes in Israel date back to before the establishment of the state – to the days of the British Mandate for Palestine and earlier.

[4] However, the first railroad in Palestine was the Jaffa-Jerusalem railway, initiated by the Ottoman Jewish entrepreneur Joseph Navon Bey and built by the French at meter gauge.

[5] The First World War brought yet another rail line: the Ottomans, with German assistance, laid tracks from Beersheba to Kadesh Barnea on the Sinai Peninsula.

During the British Mandate, rail travel increased considerably, with a line being built between Petach Tikva and Rosh HaAyin, and Lydda (which was near the main airport in the area) becoming a major hub during WWII.

[4] Shortly after the war expired, the Rosh HaNikra tunnel was dug, allowing train travel from Lebanon and points north (and west) to Palestine and Egypt.

The British also extended some of the existing railways and connected them with adjacent countries and built 600 mm (1 ft 11+5⁄8 in) gauge lines in Jaffa and Jerusalem.

In the first years of Israeli independence, rail passenger traffic grew rapidly, reaching about 4.5 million passengers per annum during the early to mid-1960s, at which point traffic began to slacken due to improvements in the road infrastructure, increases in the automobile ownership rate, lack of investment in the rail network, and a continued favoring of public transportation using buses over trains.

In the early 2000s, the Israeli government embarked on a major project to upgrade the existing rail network and build a number of entirely new lines.

This includes rebuilding the railways to Kfar Saba and Beersheba, while converting them to double-track and constructing dozens of grade separations between road and rail.

Some of these projects were initiated in the 2000s but were eventually frozen, with work on some resuming in 2009–2010, when they were included in a major government plan to connect almost all cities in Israel to the rail network.

[7] This phase includes electrifying 420 km of railways using 25 kV 50 Hz AC, the construction of 14 transformer stations, the purchase of electric rolling stock, and upgrades to maintenance facilities as well as to signalling and control systems (including the installation of ETCS Level 2 signaling throughout the network).

In December 2015 Israel Railways announced that the Spanish engineering firm SEMI (Sociedad Española de Montajes Industriales) won the tender for constructing the electrification infrastructure.

The Red Line (opened in 2023) connects Petah Tikva in the northeast to Bat Yam in the southwest, with a main 12 km (7.5 mi) underground section (covering Bnei Brak, Ramat Gan and Tel Aviv).

The Purple Line will start at Tel Aviv Savidor Central railway station, passing through the city and continuing east to Yehud with an extension to Kiryat Ono and Bar Ilan University.

[9] Preliminary construction started in 2022 and in February 2024 A consortium of Alstom, Electra and Manrav was announced as selected to build an operate the line for 25 years.

Following the low point of 2.5 million passengers in 1990, the extensive investments in the national heavy rail infrastructure beginning in the early to mid-1990s made train travel more appealing, especially given the ever-increasing road congestion, and consequently passenger rail use began rising rapidly—by a factor of about fivefold over any given ten-year span during the 1990s and 2000s.

Moreover, with several large-scale railway infrastructure projects still underway and more planned in the future, the growth in passenger numbers is expected to continue.

Originally part of the Palestine Railway, a line linked East Qantara north of the Suez Canal in Egypt, skirting the Mediterranean northward to the port of Tripoli, Lebanon.

The tracks used to continue from Rosh HaNikra to Nahariya (the current northern end of the line) making it possible for one to travel from Lebanon all the way to Tel Aviv, Cairo, and beyond.