As part of these contracts, worth Euro 65 million, the SNCF will be in charge of designing, building and operating the rolling stock. It will also take care of maintaining the high-speed line, mainly a 200 kilometres-long section, where speed is the highest, reaching up to 320 km per hour.

Therefore, a total of 34 French experts from the SNCF will be dispatched to Morocco to provide these services and share their know-how and experience with their ONCF counterparts. They will spend 79 months in Morocco.

These agreements were signed by Moroccan transport Minister Karim Ghellab and ONCF CEO Mohamed Rabie Khlie, on the one hand, and SNCF chairman Guillaume Pepy and SNCF international CEO Jean-Pierre Loubinoux, on the other.

The Protocol providing for the construction of the Casablanca-Tangier TGV line was signed in Marrakech in October 2007. The signing ceremony was chaired by HM King Mohammed VI and visiting French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

Later, the project gained more momentum as France agreed in November 2008 to grant Morocco a loan of MAD 790 million to finance the rolling stock and railway equipment.

Led by the French group Alstom, the TGV project's importance resides in the fact that it will link two of Morocco's most active economic hubs, Casablanca, the economic capital, and Tangier, which harbours the country's free zone and the giant Tangier Med port.

This high-speed train (from 200 to 320 km/hour) will reduce the time distance between Tangier and Casablanca to 2 hours and 10 minutes, instead of 5 hours and 45 minutes currently.

As a first phase of the project, the Casablanca-Tangier line is expected to be operational by the year 2013. The second line, to start in 2015, will link Casablanca with Marrakech, followed by a third line linking this latter with Agadir by the year 2020.

The TGV (Train à Grande Vitesse) is France's high-speed rail service developed by Alstom and the French national rail operator, SNCF, and operated primarily by this latter. The first line, between Paris and Lyon, was inaugurated in 1981.

The idea of the TGV was first proposed in the 1960s, after Japan had begun the construction of its Shinkansen in 1959.