Tangier-Kenitra High-Speed Rail Line

Tangier-Kenitra High-Speed Rail Line

LGV Tangier - Kenitra: Africa’s first HSR.

Africa’s first high-speed rail line Al Boraq, has cut travel time between Morocco's major cities and created new opportunities for millions of people.

With the Tangier - Kenitra line, the Office National des Chemins de Fer (ONCF) has demonstrated its ambition, building the first HSR on the African continent.

In November 2018, Morocco put into place something really rather special, a high-speed railway line connecting Tangier, Kenitra and Casablanca, the first in Morocco and in fact on the entire African continent. The event was such a big deal that King Mohamed VI and French President Emmanuel Macron were both in attendance.

The line is 350 kilometres long, passenger can travel at 200km for 320 kilometres per hour, and allows travellers to get from the city of Casablanca to Tangier in two hours ten minutes, compared with four hours 45 minutes on slower trains. The construction works, which started 2011, involved laying down 700,000 sleepers, 7,400 posts for overhead lines and 1,600 tonnes of ballast, the rock mix on which the railways rest. Some 169 railway bridges and 12 viaducts were also built. Morocco now has a world famous El Hachef viaduct. Resting on concrete stakes dug 60 metres into the earth, this structure is 3.5 kilometres long and is equipped with detectors that allow the authorities to pick up on seismic and climatic risks. And to allow a train known as Al Boraq, meaning, Thunderbolt, to pass, the construction teams had to change the landscapes themselves, making certain areas dryer and replacing crumbly subsoil with pebbles and gravel.

Morocco’s first high-speed trains linking up Tangier, Kenitra and Casablanca