Are there sleeper / night trains in Morocco?

This one has a clear answer that surprises some travellers expecting a romantic overnight rail journey: Morocco does not currently run sleeper or night trains. The national operator, ONCF, focuses on daytime inter-city services, and there are no scheduled overnight passenger trains with couchettes or sleeping cars on the network today. So if you've travelled by sleeper in Europe or Asia and hoped to do the same here, I have to gently set that expectation aside.

The reason is mostly geography and the shape of the network. Morocco's rail map is relatively compact and concentrated in the north and along the Atlantic, and the journeys that exist are short enough not to need a sleeper — Tangier to Casablanca is a couple of hours on Al Boraq, Marrakech to Fes around seven by conventional train, and most useful trips fall comfortably within a day. There simply isn't a vast overnight distance the way there is across, say, Russia or India, so the demand for sleepers never developed.

If you genuinely need to cover ground overnight, you do have alternatives, though none is a train. The long-distance CTM and Supratours coaches run some overnight services on the longer routes — say toward the south or far cities — and while a coach seat is no sleeper berth, it's a comfortable, reliable way to travel through the night and save a day. Internal flights are the other option for the longest hops, turning a very long ground journey into an hour in the air, which I sometimes recommend for, for example, reaching the deep south efficiently.

Honestly, though, my usual advice is to embrace Morocco's daytime trains rather than chase an overnight one. The scenery — olive groves, the Atlas on the horizon, palm-fringed plains — is part of the pleasure and you'd sleep right through it. For most itineraries, travelling by day and spending the night in a riad or desert camp is both more comfortable and a richer experience than any sleeper would be, so the absence of night trains is rarely a real loss once you're planning around it.