CNN Travel, the American travel e-magazine, recently published its list of the world’s fastest trains, and ranked Morocco’s high-speed train (TGV), Al Boraq, at number 6.
“In 2018, Africa gained its first high-speed railway with the opening of the Al-Boraq line in Morocco,” CNN Travel highlighted.
Morocco launched its high-speed train in 2018. King Mohammed VI and French President Emmanuel Macron took a ride aboard the train to mark its inauguration.
The service is the first phase of the country’s planned 1,500-kilometer (930-mile) high-speed network.
CNN Travel pointed out that French-built derivatives of TGV Euroduplex “double-deck electric trains operate at up to 320 kph (200 mph) on a dedicated 186-kilometer (116-mile) new line between Tangier and Kenitra.”
The train makes stops in just four stations: Casablanca, Rabat, Kenitra, and Tangier. A trip from Casablanca to Tangier on Al-Boraq takes only 2 hours and 10 minutes. Meanwhile, a Rabat-Tangier trip via a bus or a car usually takes over four hours.
The $2 billion project also included an upgrade “of the existing 137-kilometer (85-mile) section between Rabat and Casablanca for higher speeds, reducing the end-to-end journey time from 4 hours 45 minutes to just 2 hours 10 minutes,” it wrote.
“Once the proposed new line to Casablanca is built, travel time will be cut to just 90 minutes,” CNN Travel added.
With the success story of Al Boraq, Morocco is thinking of expanding railway projects to include stops in other major cities, including Marrakech and Agadir.
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Morocco’s government took loans from France and different partners to launch the €2 billion high-speed rail project. Countries like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the UAE also gave funding for the rail line.
Morocco spent over MAD 5.8 billion (€540 million) on the rail’s construction.
Al-Boraq holds the African rail speed record too. During pre-service tests in 2017 one of the 12 Alstom-built trains touched 357 kph (222 mph) on the new line — more than twice the speed of any next fastest trains currently running on the African continent, it says.
