Moroccan High Speed Rail: Tangiers - Casablanca

Moroccan high-speed line to open in spring 2018 | International Railway Journal

Speaking at the UIC High-Speed Rail World Congress in Tokyo on July 8, ONCF's director of development Mr Mohammed Smouni said that the 183km Tangiers - Kenitra line has been delayed due to difficulties in completing land acquisition, while costs for the €1.8bn project have risen 10-15% above the original budget.

The cost per kilometre is €8.5m excluding the four new stations and the fleet of 14 200m-long double-deck TGVs.

The overall project is now estimated to be 70% complete. Civil engineering is 80% complete and work on equipping the line is scheduled to start in December. The maintenance depot is 88% complete, and will have 14 tracks totalling 10km with capacity for 30 trains.

Tangier is on the Atlantic-Ocean side of the Straits of Gibraltar, and Kenitra is nearly 200 km south along the Atlantic coast. If this line is successful, it may be extended to other Moroccan cities.

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All aboard Morocco's high-speed train

Good video. Get a glimpse of Morocco. €1.8 billion. Some question it's wisdom.

Morocco has a reasonable rail network, serving most of the main towns. It is not surprising that they have adopted a high speed train. I have travelled on part of the western line and found it much the same as a train in the poorer parts of Europe. It was a secondhand French carriage, probably of the Corail grade. What is really lacking is the connections the French built to be a part of a North African system into Algeria and Tunisia. I think there are still no trains that connect to Algeria. That is the route a TGV train would be especially useful for. I am not sure if the French use any non-electric TGV trains. I suspect Morocco doesn't have any electrified lines.

This observation is worth considering.

The project has attracted criticism for being a misguided use of money when there are more serious problems than transport facing Morocco. The country's former finance minister, Mohamed Berrada, said that a better use of the money spent on the rail line would be to address poverty and illiteracy.[10]

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My impression from the current trains - about 20 years ago - were that the former French Corail carriages were quite suitable for their needs. The trains were not all that fast, but much better than the various narrow gauge networks in the rest of Africa. I do think the TGV line being installed is much more advanced than they need. The king has obtained funding from Saudi but really it's a vanity project. After all, Morocco is not an oil producer so its national income comes from more mundane sources - fruit to export to Europe during the winter; other agricultural products; fish; fertiliser.

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Africa's first high-speed trains are coming to Morocco in 2018
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Testing has begun on the French-made double-decker train cars that will reach speeds of 200 mph, CNN reports. Expected to fully roll out in 2018, the trains will carry passengers from Tangier to Casablanca and cut travel time more than in half.

Funded by governments in Morocco, France, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates, the project costs $2 billion and is expected to help ferry passengers from city to city in a little more than two hours. (For reference, the drive is about three-and-a-half hours.)

Tangier, an entry point for many coming to Morocco on flights or ferries from Spain, Italy, and other Mediterranean countries, is currently about five hours by rail from Casablanca.

Current trains carry about three million people annually along the coast between the two, but the Moroccan national rail operator ONCF anticipates that number will grow once the new cars begin service next year, with the aim of six million passengers a year after three years of operation. The trains, which don't have an exact launch date yet, were originally scheduled to run in December 2015, but construction and infrastructure delays have plagued the project.
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