By Femi Akinola
Morocco is a country located in North Africa. There is no better way to explore the country than by train. Travelling by rail allow visitors to know everything Morocco offers and the visitor will get the best out of the trip to the Arabian country.
For this, the Moroccan authorities embarked on a significant fast-speed trains. In November 2018, Morocco inaugurated a high speed railway line connecting Tangier, Kenitra and Casablanca. It was the the first in that North African country and in a fact, on the entire African Continent.
The line is 350 kilometres long and can be travelled at 320 kilometres per hour, and allow travellers to get from the city of Casablanca in the southern part of the country to Tangier in two hours ten minutes, compared with the slower trains that runs same distance in four hours-forty five minutes.
The aim of the Moroccan authority was to position the country as a major player in Africa and attract more foreign investment into the country. On the French side, Morocco’s former colonial master, wanted to use the line as an example so as to win other contracts across African continent.
Inauguration ceremony of the high speed trains was such a big deal to the Moroccans to the extent that King Mohammed VI of Morocco and French President Emmanuel Marcon were both in attendance.
Construction works started in 2011 and it involves laying down 700,000 sleepers, 7,400 posts for overhead lines and 1,600 tonnes of ballast, the rock mix on which the rilway rest. It also involved some 169 railway bridgesnd 12 viaducts were also built.
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The most impressive of the lot was the El Hachef viaduct which rested on concrete stakes dug 60 metres into the ground. This structure is 3.5 kilometres long and it was equipped with detectors that allow the authrities to pick up on seismic and climatic risk.
To allow the high speed train known as Al Baraq (Thunderbolt) to pass, the construction teams had to change the landscapes themselves, making certain ares dryer and replaced crumbled subsoil with pebbles and gravel.
The rail project cost a whopping Euros 2 billion. Fifty percent of the cost was financed by various French loans. That aside, the French national rail operator, SNCF, also chipped in by offering its expertise to their Moroccan counterparts. The initiative served the interest of both Morocco and France.
Four years after the inaguration of this laudable project, the Moroccan government goes further by aiming to extend the line to Marrakech, a huge tourist hub in the country. The government also believe another line should link Marrakech with Agadir, another region that is popular with visitors.
In January 2022, the nation’s Minister of Transport and Logistics, Mohammed Abdeljalin, announced that this extension of the high speed lines would cost at least Euros 10 million, and that it would be financed by a combination of the private and public sectors.
This 230 kilometre line will provide better links to southern Morocco, another of the government’s key aims. According to France Info Afrique, 20 or so hectares of land have already been bought by Office National des Chemins de Fer (ONCF), for the project.
The new two lines are only a small part of Morocco’s plans to expand the national rail network. If the Minister of Transport and Logistic is to be believed, the ONCF plans to build a whopping 1,300 kilometres of high speed railway and 3,800 kilometrs of more traditional tracks by 2040, linking up 43 cities across the country.
Nigeria can emulate these bold initiatives of the Moroccan authorities by putting in place high speed railway line that will connect Lagos, the commercial nerve of the country with the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) Abuja, and from Abuja to Port Harcourt, or link Abuja with Kano through Kaduna, and improve on these with time.
