High speed rail terminus, Station Casa-Voyageurs, Casablanca, Morocco. December 2019
The Casa-Voyageurs Railway Station was directly across from my hotel. The location was perfect for taking the train as well as Casablanca's new city tram. Morocco and South Africa are the only two countries on the continent with high speed rail. Morocco's was built with help from SNCF (French National Railways). The Casablanca station was actually an addition to the existing French colonial station which now sits beside it in eerie emptiness. Hopefully, that old station will be renovated into something useful lest it be lost to progress.
The Casa-Voyageurs station is modern to the max. The interior looks more like an airport terminal than a train station. There is nothing that speaks "developing country" inside - from buying tickets, to getting a coffee at Starbucks, to waiting for the train in a spacious and clean salle d'attente, to the platforms - this place is more akin to the futuristic train station in Liège, Belgium than a new station "somewhere in North Africa". If the Moroccans can maintain and expand their high-speed network, they will be transportation leaders in not only Africa but also the Arabic-speaking world.
The area in front of the station is a main stop for the city's new tram and looks like an old city square from Europe rather than "exotic Morocco". My introduction to Casablanca was extremely Western while my arrival to Tangier by sea had felt, in contrast, very much like arriving in "exotic Africa". First impressions do matter, I think. The new train stations in Tangier and Rabat are equally as modern as Casa-Voyageurs, but the Casa station is the largest and the most impressive.
When the prophet Mohammed took his mystical flight to heaven, he rode on the back of a beast called a "Bouraq". The train service on the high-speed line is named for that creature and well it should be. The trains are at the same level of comfort as those in Japan or Spain. The line is a dedicated high speed railway most of the way and there are plans to make it fully "high-speed only" between Tangier and Casablanca, not to mention extending it to Marrakesh, the gateway to Sub-Saharan Africa. That train in Morocco made me feel like a modern, developed future was really possible anywhere. Morocco isn't particularly rich, but it made a commitment to an important infrastructure project and it worked. The train is well-used (unlike in Spain and Japan where trains are usually empty outside of peak periods). It felt like a very good national investment.
Transportation infrastructure transforms nations. Watch Morocco carefully, they might just be on the cusp of something big.
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