The tour train hauled by two ONCF EMD GT26 design diesels led by No. DH411 with No. DH367 seen at Tendrara on October 5 which is the highest point on the Moroccan rail network at 1350m asl and famous as the location where James Bond went by train in the movie Spectre.
ANDY DAVIS
UK-BASED group the Branch Line Society ran a special train in Morocco in October, the first the society has ever run in Africa. Highlight of the two-day tour was a trip on the line into the Sahara Desert to Bouárfa, although plans to visit another long branch line to Jerada, closed to passengers since the 1960s, were cancelled the day before by Moroccan Railways (ONCF) which ran the train.
The line into the Sahara Desert to Bouárfa formed part of the planned Trans-Saharan Railway. Plans had been drawn up in France in the 1920s and in 1941 the Vichy government, allied with Germany, decided to build the line which was destined to end in Bamako in present-day Mali, from where trains could use an existing line to Dakar on the Atlantic coast of what is now Senegal. The line was never completed but had reached Bouárfa around 290km south from the junction with the Fes to Oujda line in Morocco in 1931 and was then extended south on to Béchar in Algeria, opening in 1942.