How reliable are Moroccan trains — do they run on time?

I've ridden Moroccan trains for years and the honest headline is that they're far more reliable than first-timers fear — but the two halves of the network behave differently, so it's worth separating them. Al Boraq, the high-speed service running Tangier–Kenitra–Casablanca, is genuinely punctual in the European sense: I plan connections off it with confidence, and in dozens of trips I can count the meaningful delays on one hand. It leaves and arrives to the minute far more often than not, and the live boards reflect that.

The conventional ONCF inter-city trains — Marrakech, Fes, Meknes, Rabat, Oujda and the rest — are the ones to give a little slack. They're reliable enough that I use them constantly and recommend them happily, but they can slip ten, twenty, occasionally thirty minutes behind, and the looser running tends to compound on the longer southern and eastern legs. It's rarely the dramatic, hours-late chaos some travellers brace for; it's the ordinary, manageable lateness of a busy national rail network. Departures are usually closer to time than arrivals.

What pushes delays up is predictable: peak summer heat, the Friday and Sunday crush, and the big public holidays and Eid when everyone travels at once. On those days I add a buffer as a matter of course. The flip side is that off-peak midweek services often run bang on time, and the system as a whole has improved markedly in recent years — the network is modern, the rolling stock is being renewed, and the staff are professional about keeping things moving.

My practical rule is simple and it has never let me down: if you have a flight to catch or a one-shot onward connection, don't bank on a conventional train arriving exactly on schedule — take an earlier service and absorb the slack with a coffee at the destination. For everything else, just travel and don't fret about a few minutes. The trains are reliable enough to be the backbone of most itineraries I build; you only need the buffer when something irreversible is waiting at the other end.