This project is never going to be a reality. Not just because it's extremely difficult to build and mantain, but because there's no real motivation to make it a reality.
Even if they would start working on it (which I don't expect due to both economics and politics), It would never be done before 2030 which is a crazy estimate. Many simple transport links take longer than 6 years, let alone this complex tunnel
It is not a tunnel to Africa but a tunnel to a little bit of North-African coast. The interconnect to elsewhere would need another giant pile of money.
You can easily make the same argument for the Eurotunnel though. It goes from London to Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam. It's not exactly a convenient way to go from Inverness to Cluj-Napoca. Morocco already has by far the best passenger rail network in Africa so it's a very logical connection. Tangier already have a HSR rail to Cassablanca so it would connect Europe to the only African HSR line.
Well, this IS a tunnel to Africa though (?!). Of course a tunnel (a bridge, etc.) will connect the closest points to each other, by definition. But indeed is (as said in the video) a link between the two continents
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@@leonpaelinck well, in that case it's mainly France's fault. Spain already has HSR to the frontier in Catalonia and is building it's HSR line in the Basque Country.
As long as there are such cultural (and ensuing life standard) differences between these two continents, it is probably best for all to keep a safety distance. Also for Africa, even if they don't want to see it
@@darthmaul216they can, but you would very costly to use since you need double or triple engine and limitations in the number of carts. Is the main reason why they are building base tunnels across the alps with much less steep gradient.
Projects like these need political will. The only scenario where I could imagine this happening is if Morocco still were a Spanish colony and Spain wanted to link it to the mainland. Today, with a fear of migration, the opposite is true, Spain and Europe want to make travel between Morocco and Spain as difficult as possible. Maybe there's an economic interest in laying down power lines, gas pipelines or similar, but that's about it.
Unpopular opinion: They absolutely should build it. Many people say, there are no further connections in Africa. Right. This could be the motivation to build more rails in Africa and maybe some time later through the desert. Or down to Dakar. A good rail network can make miracles. If they can get enough income for maintenance, they should do it. *if possible.
Well that's the thing, the Sahara is freaking big. It's more or less the size of Europe. It's almost four times the size of the Mediterranean. It's not just pulling a set of railway lines through disputed (Western Sahara) or troubled (the entire Maghreb) areas. It can be done, of course. The Australians did it, after all, build a railway line through some of the most inhospitable terrain on earth. In fact, they did it twice. But Australia doesn't have the same issues that the Maghreb has, where literally every single country has seen a coup d'état over the past couple of years, with the military juntas cosying up Russia and Wager. I do think that Europe dropped the ball on Africa, letting China with Belt and Road programma - which should really be called Ball and Chain - build railway lines in Africa, while providing loan shark style credit to cash-strapped African governments.
@@SeverityOnebuilding a railway through the Sahara is impractical, but building a few circumnavigating it is completely reasonable and could easily connect all the way to cairo and across the suez to istanbul
@@KingFinnch Fair enough, but there's already a large capacity transport corridor: the Mediterranean. Which happens to connect to the Indian Ocean and Asia as well. It's a chicken-and-egg situation: building a new railway line doesn't make sense because there's nothing to connect it to. Rail transport in the Middle East isn't much to write home about, and there are seas everywhere.
@@SeverityOneMorocco already has an increasingly large high speed rail network and it is expecting to grow. There are of course political issues with expanding it further south, but! every communication and transport link will help to lead to more political cooperation in the region. There are already many big and small initiatives to expand transnational road and rail networks all over Africa. It’s a long term investment that will someday pay out in increasing peace, stability and socioeconomic progress.
I think it's completely worth it. Although, I'd hope it would be configured to transport a lot of cargo, not just passengers. Getting more people to take electric trains instead of planes is important for the environment, but the same applies to cargo being transported currently by plane and by ship.
Cargo is definitely the key, waybills are way more profitable than passenger tickets. Indeed selling freight capacity is generally how current rail and air lines make most of their revenue, which subsidizes the transport for humans using the same routes.
Did you just suggest putting wires for which as an engineering certainty the insulation will melt/combust at high heat in the emergency exit? What an insane suggestion. Particularly with the confounding variable that an earthquake that disables the railway tunnel, is likely to also cause issues with any high voltage lines. Telecoms don’t need a tunnel, they’re very happy on the sea floor, and there’s no bottleneck there, no requirement since information doesn’t need to follow the same path as people.
It was expensive to protect the Channel Tunnel against a huge number of aggressive pedestrians. Here, it will be far more pedestrians. That‘s why this tunnel won‘t ever exist.
As a rail enthusiast, I have dreamed since being a young boy to travel via rail from Cape Town to Cairo (Cecil Rhodes original dream) and then over to Europe and then take the Trans Siberian. Heck, at the moment I would be happy just to see my country, South Africa, enter the high-speed rail game. We need more stability in Africa as a whole though. We still feel the effects of colonialism - not in as much from old school colonialists, but rather what resulted from when they were finally put out. We now have dictators and self-enriching people in charge and so most countries remain oppressed (by their own people). Just here in South Africa, we have politicians building fancy mansions and just outside the tall walls, there are no paved roads nor electricity for the nearby village as one example. The politicians use the race card as a very powerful tool and there is much racial tension from all sides, especially in election years. They will say things to upset one side, that side responds just as it is planned for them to respond and then they say: "See, they hate you, they do not want to build a nation with you." I cannot speak for all African countries of course, and trust me, seeing the Chinese getting involved and taking over industries when they know the African counterparts do not pay back whatever loans, leads to a new type of colonialism. So you have a select few in each state that are stinking rich, who influence people in lesser positions because they have money, then you have the masses under the strain of paying back loans through heightened taxes (but the funds go 'missing') and you are left desolate. It will take a very long time for people to change their mentality and to see we really need to be together to pull forward and out of the muck. It will also take a true understanding of each other from all sides and accepting that one culture does not think like the next and that is ok, it does not make them lesser or better.
This would be a good jumping off point to then build several trans-Saharan long distance railways linking African countries and their rapidly growing economies together, for example, one following the west coast of the continent all the way to Namibia, one cutting across straight from Morocco to Nigeria via Niamey, and a Mediterranean coast one linking Tunisia to Egypt. However, considering the geopolitics and conflicts of the region, this is but a pipe dream for the time being. I bet we'll have colonised Mars before Africa gets good railways, but I have hope it could happen in my lifetime, assuming I live a REALLY long time.
Unfortunately to many political problems between the countries. To the East there are closed borders with Algeria, to the south I doubt Mauritania would facilitate such a project in fear of angering Algeria and the Polisario.
As cool as this would be, I struggle to see it happening given all the challenges you highlighted. Morocco and the other North African countries would need to build out a bigger rail network first for it to be worth it. And to think it could be open by 2030 is hilarious.
Imagine in the future when there are bridges or tunnels connecting gibraltar and bering strait, you could travel with a 2000km/h hyperloop from south africa to europe, trough the entire asia over to alaska, canada, the US, south america, down to the strait of magellan near antarctica, lol. I wonder how long that would take including several stops (in most big cities along the line in every country). That journey would be absolutely insane so we better build a 2-3 story maglev with lots of cabins and amenities. I designed a map like that like 15 yrs ago and named it the global subway. I've designed several multistory trains as well. The cost of that thing would be in trillions of USD
Morocco actually has a huge HSR project coming for the World Cup. But yeah, it'd be basically only a connection to Morocco. A connection to Argelia won't probably happen, as this country and Morocco don't have very good relations. Further South would also be not an option I think, come on, the Sahara is on the middle. Sooo, what we both already said, just a connection to Morocco.
A bridge would need columns the size of burj Khalifa to support it. There are thousands of megatankers passing that straight. Collumn needs to be high enough to let it through, while already 400m deep under water. Also needs to be strong enough to withstand earthquakes and collision with these tankers. And you’ll need a lot of these collumns. Don’t see it happening.
On the basis of that type of economic analysis, we would all kill ourselves - and it is the analysis economists want to use. Tunnelling is vastly improved since the days of the Channel tunnel. The main issue could be digging the crosspassages through the clay sections. The tunnel would attract its own traffic. Morocco will need to put armed guards on its end of the tunnels and the corridor of its rail line to Casablanca. Spain will need to build about 100 km of rail line in Spain to connect its southern cities anyway.
Rail freight could play and pay a large share in paying. To squeeze what can be moved through, they would likely have to go for dual stack containers as in the US. Somthing the Eurotunnel lack and so do those under the Alps.
@@neonfighter2855India runs double stack container trains under electric wire all the time. The problem is with the loading gauge and the clearances on the rail tunnels.
@@gamewarrior010 It's not that it couldn't be done. It's that it wouldn't integrate with the Spanish and Morrocan rail networks, making the whole thing pointless. You'd need to make the tunnel so that trains could travel from France all the way through to deepest Morocco and beyond, so the tunnel standards would have to match those of either side.
It will be doubtful that this tunnel would attract enough traffic. The Euro tunnel link between the UK and mainland Europe does exist for 30 years now, and still the ferries are as busy as ever, because their fare for the crossing is a little over half the price of the tunnel, well worth the extra hour to cross the channel. Besides that the economy of the Maghreb region isn't as large as from the UK alone, rail connections are limited to Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia as the other countries don't have connecting rail links. Security of newly built rail lines would be a major problem in countries such as Tschad, Niger and Libya Then border security needs to be at a very high level as the tunnel would create a much more convenient route for illegal migration. So it has to be seen if this tunnel will be built, even when they can solve the geological problems.
You have not seen the traffic comming from Northern Europe, trough Spain, towards north Africa and back, each year. People from Marocco, Tunisia and Argelia working in Europe.
Why do we try to make big (rail) infrastructure projects to be profitable looking at them in isolation? What about the wider economic benefits? Have we ever made sure that our roads cover their costs from operational income?
I'd say the money would be better spent to utilize the undersea currents in the strait to generate electricity and buy/invent adequate electric ships/ferries for transit. It would be a better investment opportunity because they could export the know-how across the planet.
Its not April yet dude. The construction would be expensive and complicated, while the real gains will never pay back for it, so it would be just a massive waste of the resources and time. There is not a single valid reason to build such monstrosity, not to mention stuff like border controls. Also you dont want country like Morocco to be a partner in operating such a project.
"Expensive and complicated" that's what they all said before major innovations like the electric grid, modern skyscrapes.... Why not to mention border control? The Moroccans have one of the best and strongest security/police forces in the world. Why wouldn't you want Morocco as an operating partner? It's maybe the most stable country in the continent and is a trusted partner. Morocco dominates diplomacy, I'd say Morocco almost pretty much dictates the terms when it comes to Spanish-Morocco relations.
We're talking about a HSR line between North Africa and Spain only. There are pretty much no railwsys connecting north Africa and the rest of Africa. This would #1 promote Morocco's economy #2 Facilitate dynamisms between the two countries and continents #3 Allow Spain to receive a lot of goods through railway which will benefit it a lot. This would also allow Europe to benefit further more from moroccan essential assets such as phosophate, green energy, green hydrogen... This would likely mostly be financed by Spain's government, Morocco's government, Morocco's king, European institutions, International funds for development and growth, and why not the saudis, the emiraties.... Although I'm completely against it due to the more important problems happening in Morocco (education and health)
Geology and economics are different. Is it worth having a tunnel simply because it is short? Malmö and Sweden generally having links with DK/KPH makes some sense, not sure if it is economically viable or a 'sunk cost'.
@@EdMcF1 it depends, it would make a land connection so freight trains can bring in resources to Europe instead of having to load ships. That is also not the only tunnel we have. There is also a train tunnel from Funen to Zealand, connecting two danish islands. So again, if we can, so can they. Should they? No clue. Morocco is massive in the phosphate industry
I don’t see the benefit of this project. There are super fast that travel within a half hour to Spain and Morocco. Every hour there are a couple of ferries that go both ways. It’s already easy and convenient. This is nothing more than a prestige project.
A single tunnel should be relatively easy to check though, no? I'm not sure how you'd easily sneak through this particular kind of of infrastructure. Personally I don't think immigrants would really change from their current tactics which are not so easy to all intercept.
Yes of course a tunnel 500m under water with heavy control on both sides (but especially the Moroccan side, they're the best at security) would be the first choice to immigrate to europe, not large and unsupervised ferries 😂
