Regev's tweet. "Soon with us"? Maybe in pictures (photo: documentation on social networks according to section 27A of the Copyright Law, screenshot)
"On the high-speed train from Rabat to Tangier. 300 km / h, 250 km in an hour and a quarter. Soon with us," Transportation Minister Miri Regev from Morocco tweeted today, lighting the network.
After all, a train traveling at 300 kilometers per hour, why would it take an hour and a quarter to cover a distance of 250 kilometers?
But Regev, who went to Morocco at the head of a large delegation of members of the Transportation Ministry and companies subordinate to him for a "professional tour," most of which is devoted to tourism, was actually not wrong in numbers.
Although in the video she called it a "bullet train," it is actually a high-speed train: the El Burq line, named after the mare of the Prophet Muhammad, is the pride of Morocco, a modern line connecting Tangier to Casablanca via Quneitra and Rabat. But its average speed is closer to 200 kilometers per hour, and these are not the speeds of bullet lines like in China, for example, which achieves a maximum speed of 350 kilometers per hour, and an average of more than 300 kilometers per hour.
Regev and her delegation traveled between Tangier and Rabat, a section that is indeed 250 kilometers long, but the train does not travel all the way at a speed of 300 kilometers per hour: there are sections where it reaches 320 kilometers per hour, But only the section between Tangier and Quneitra is suitable for high speeds, where it also has to accelerate to maximum speed and then slow to a stop.
The 88 kilometers between Quneitra and Rabat are carried out at a maximum speed of only 160 kilometers per hour, like the trains in Israel, because the tracks on this section have not been upgraded to safety standards and infrastructure for really fast travel.
The high-speed train line in Morocco (Photo: ONCF)
So Regev was right about the numbers, but she was wrong about the timetable, with the promise of "soon." Although there has been talk of a train to Eilat for years, the full planning of the line has not yet been completed. A budget has not yet been formulated, which is expected to be more than NIS 40 billion, four times that of the high-speed railway line to Jerusalem, which is called high-speed, but only compared to the original line from Turkish times.
The Moroccan government signed an agreement to build the line in 4 with a promise that it would open in 2008. In practice the work started late and it opened - surprise! - Three years after the original date, with 2015 instead of the planned 12 trains, purchased from French Alstom.
How much will it take in Israel? Even the high-speed line to Jerusalem took 18 years to build, and its length is only 17 km.The distance to the train between Tel Aviv and Eilat is about 57 km, when it will be necessary to upgrade the 370 km from Tel Aviv to Dimona, build about 150 km from Dimona to Hatseva, most of them in tunnels and bridges, and another 70 km from Quarry to Eilat.
In the southern city, there is a need to build a new northern port to which the train will also transport cargo, and there is no place to transfer it through the city to the existing southern port, beyond the cost of the track itself. The plan also talks about 150 stations, Tel Aviv, Hatseva, Sde Ramon and Eilat, a design that alone does not allow the construction of a bullet train on this route, which in any case is very expensive and will cause more damage to the environment, because of the need for a completely straight track to enable the high speed, with turns in a very wide radius.
So even if Regev sets an Israeli record and succeeds in approving the project within two years, not including a tender, winner selection and losers' appeals, this is a track that will not start operating before 4. Close it is not.
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