The Vennbahn

A railway handed over

The Vennbahn was a railway that ran from the coalfields around Aachen to the north of Luxembourg.^[1] After the First World War, the Treaty of Versailles transferred the districts of Eupen and Malmedy from Germany to Belgium and set up a commission to fix the new frontier on the spot, “taking into account the economic factors and the means of communication”.^[4]

With Eupen and Malmedy Belgian, the commission decided on 27 March 1920, five votes to none with the German member abstaining, that the railway line through Germany should be Belgian too. People in Monschau protested that they had lost a vital artery, and in May 1920 Belgium sent 200 soldiers to guard the line against sabotage.^[2] A treaty signed in Aachen on 6 November 1922 settled the details: German stayed the language on the line, even for Belgian staff, the stations kept their names, fares were in German currency, and passengers moving on and off the trains were free of Belgian controls.^[2]

“taking into account the economic factors and the means of communication”^[4]

Five pieces of Germany

From 1921 the track between Raeren and Kalterherberg, with its embankment, was Belgian territory: a corridor 28.5 km long. German land west of it was cut off, leaving five German exclaves, Münsterbildchen, Roetgener Wald, Rückschlag, Mützenich and Ruitzhof. Rückschlag, near Konzen, covers 1.5 hectares and holds a single house.^[2] Along one 35 km stretch, Belgian and German territory alternate 11 times; in Roetgen the first exclave is the old station yard.^[5]

In 1940 Germany annexed Eupen and Malmedy, and the exclaves disappeared. After the war the old border came back, and the exclaves with it. Belgium asked in 1946–47 for small border changes that would have absorbed them, but in 1949 it dropped most of its claims, partly because rebuilding the line was going to cost so much.^[2]

A cycle path through two countries

Freight stopped running at the end of the 1980s. The line became a 125 km cycle path from Aachen to Troisvierges, part of Wallonia’s network of routes on old railways.^[1] It still crosses Belgian territory inside Germany: when the stretch between Raeren and Lammersdorf was surfaced in 2010–11, the authorities on each side had to file planning applications for each other’s land and agree on signs, police and emergency services.^[6]