It is one of the busiest regional train connections in the country: the Maaslijn. The railway, which goes through the Land van Cuijk, has been there since 1883 and has a rich history. It is also known as ‘the Holy Line’, Tante Treintje was a household name there for forty years and Wim Geurts found an old cash book from his great-grandfather containing all kinds of financial details about the railway. “The book is sacred to me,” he says.
In the late 1870s, plans were made to create a train connection between Nijmegen and Venlo, says Theo Hoefs, chairman of the Cuijks Archives. “The original idea was that the Maaslijn would not go through Brabant, but later that was decided.”
The workers who built the track often came from the west of the country. In Brabant they noticed that there were quite a few churches and monasteries around the railway. “Here there is a church on every street corner. Immediately when you cross the Maas at Mook you see a church in Katwijk in Brabant.”
“And you leave the Land van Cuijk again at the Limburg village of Smakt. There you almost go through a pilgrimage church,” adds Hoefs. “It is therefore not surprising that the railway track was quickly nicknamed Sacred Line got. It was quite a sacred area here and those workers from the west were not used to that. I think that’s why they noticed it so much.”
Upgrading the Maaslijn
With 22,000 travelers per day, the Maaslijn is one of the busiest regional lines in the country. The 88 kilometer long route, dating from 1883, is now being extensively renovated. Old diesel trains must make way for an electric variant, but this requires more than eighty kilometers of track to be electrified. This is done by installing overhead lines.
The Maaslijn brought a lot of work, including for the great-grandfather of Wim Geurts from Vierlingsbeek. “He built watchman’s houses along the route,” he says. During a renovation, Wim found an old cash book under the stairs, still full of pencil lines and amounts.
His great-grandfather was popularly called Nierke Geurts, Wim knows. He was a furniture maker and timer and started a business in 1869. He then started working in the railway industry around 1883. “He wrote down the income and expenses he had for the work around the Maaslijn in this cash book. For me, that booklet is as sacred as the line itself,” says Wim, laughing. “It is a tangible piece of family history and at the same time an insight into how the railway was once constructed here.”
The Maaslijn is still in use in 2025, although a lot has changed over the years. For example, switches and railway barriers are operated automatically; decades ago this was still done manually. Working on the railways was often done by men, although there were also exceptions.
One of these exceptions is Dina Muller, Theo Hoefs knows. “Although her nickname was nicer: Aunt Treintje. She started her work as a railway keeper in Cuijk in 1921. She ensured that the level crossing barriers were opened and closed by hand.”
“There was a big party in 1961,” says the chairman of the Cuijks Archives. “Aunt Treintje received a certificate that she had opened and closed the railway barriers for forty years. It was celebrated in a big way and it was even in the newspaper.” Not much later, manual operation of the railway barriers came to an end.
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