The choice is not really about speed
Makkah to Madinah is the one Saudi journey where a genuine alternative to the road exists, and the question people ask is almost always “which is faster”. It is the wrong question, because the train and the car are not doing the same job. One moves you between two stations. The other moves you between two doors.
Everything that decides this comes from that difference, and none of it is about the middle of the journey.
Count the legs, not the journey
A private transfer is one leg: your hotel entrance in Makkah to your hotel entrance in Madinah, with your luggage in the boot the whole way.
The train is three: hotel to station, station to station, station to hotel. Two of those three are ground transport you still have to arrange, and they happen at the two moments you are least equipped for them โ leaving with all your luggage, and arriving in an unfamiliar city with all your luggage.
People compare the middle leg because it is the one with a published timetable. The two legs either side are where the journey is actually won or lost, and they are the ones nobody plans.
Luggage decides it more often than anything else
On a train, your luggage is your problem for the whole journey: onto the platform, into the carriage, off at the other end, and through a station you do not know. In a car it goes in once and comes out once, handled by the driver at both ends.
For a traveller with one bag this is a non-issue. For a family with five cases it is the whole decision. Our seven-seat Hyundai H1 carries six large bags and the eleven-seat Toyota Hiace carries ten; the published fleet capacities tell you what fits before you are standing next to it. The train has no equivalent guarantee, because the constraint there is what you can physically carry between three points.
Group size flips the answer
For one or two people, the train is a serious option and often the more interesting one. For a group, it stops being a comparison: seats have to be available together, everyone has to make the same departure, and the two end legs multiply by however many vehicles the group needs anyway.
A single vehicle carrying the group door to door removes the coordination entirely, which is why group vans and minibuses tend to win this journey once the party is more than about four people. The threshold is not a rule, but it is remarkably consistent.
Departure time is the quiet cost
A train leaves when it leaves. A car leaves when you are ready. That sounds like a small thing until it collides with a checkout time, a prayer, a meal, or a member of the party who is not ready.
If your day has a fixed point in it โ a booked hotel check-in, an appointment, a flight out of Madinah โ the flexible departure is worth more than it looks, because it absorbs the delay instead of turning it into a missed departure and a new ticket. If your day has no fixed points, that flexibility is worth much less, and the train’s schedule becomes a feature rather than a constraint.
When the train is clearly the better answer
Two travellers with light luggage, no fixed appointment at either end, staying somewhere convenient to the stations, who would rather watch the country go past than sit in a car. That is a good train journey and we will happily say so.
If that is you, our step-by-step guide to booking Haramain train tickets covers the booking itself, which causes more difficulty than the journey does. What we would still suggest is arranging the two end legs in advance rather than at the kerb, because a station taxi rank at the end of a long day is exactly the situation the rest of this site exists to avoid.
When the car is clearly the better answer
A family. Anyone with more luggage than hands. A traveller who cannot easily manage a station, for whom our notes on travelling with older passengers are the relevant reading. A group that has to arrive together. Anyone whose departure time is genuinely uncertain until the morning.
The Makkah to Madinah private transfer is a fixed-price door-to-door booking, so the comparison you are actually making is one price against a ticket plus two local transfers plus the handling of your own bags. Compared honestly, the gap is usually narrower than people expect.
What to do if you are still undecided
Decide the two end legs first. Work out how you would get from your Makkah hotel to the station with your actual luggage, and how you would get from the Madinah station to your actual hotel. If both of those answers are easy, take the train. If either one makes you pause, that pause is the answer, and it is worth trusting.
Whichever you choose, book the ground transport before the day rather than on it. Our guide to advance booking sets out what changes when a journey is arranged ahead rather than improvised, and the answer on this route is: quite a lot.