Cycle on the Bels Lijntje, the most unlikely former railway connection in the Benelux

Belgium and the Netherlands used to be good friends, who worked together very well in the railway field. The fourth cross-border railway ran from Tilburg via Riel, Alphen, Baarle and Weelde to Turnhout. It was a line of promise when it was built by the Grand Central Belge, a consortium of Belgian railway companies that also operated lines such as Maastricht-Aachen, Maastricht-Hasselt, Rotterdam-Antwerp and Antwerp-Mönchengladbach, aka the Iron Rhine. From the fifties the railway in Brabant was popularly called ‘Bels Lijntje’; dialect for Belgian Lijntje.

It was perhaps the most unlikely rail connection in the Benelux. On October 1, 1867, the line was opened, not with a festivities framed first ride, as was the custom at the time, but quietly. From that first day, expectations were too high. You can hardly blame the railroad pioneers of that time; the train was still a new phenomenon, there was little track left and it was not yet clear which routes would or would not be successful. If history had turned out differently, this railway would now have been the most important connection from Amsterdam to Brussels and Paris, and international intercity trains and Thalys trains would race through the North Brabant and Flemish Kempen. Each time it was only a haircut, a few times in a row.

Finally, in 1973, the last train ran on the railway. Today it is a 31 kilometer cycle path from Tilburg through nature, over the winding border at Baarle and then into Belgium to Turnhout. The rails have disappeared, but there are still railway guards’ houses and station buildings that remind us of the more than one hundred years of existence of the Bels Lijntje. You will discover those remnants during this Volkskrant-bicycle tour.

Railway zone Tilburg

Tilburg train station was designed in 1965 in a modernist reconstruction style by railway architect Koen van der Gaast. Striking is the floating wooden roof of so-called hyppar dishes – popularly called ‘the prawn cracker roof’. Anyway, thanks to this imposing roof, the Tilburg train station is a national monument. Behind the station, the former workshops of the Maatschappij tot Exploitatie van Staatsspoorwegen have been transformed into the Spoorzone with offices, apartments and catering in restored monumental railway sheds. And on the other hand, a former transfer station for mail and general cargo of Van Gend & Loos has been turned into a city park with a skate park, scouting building, city campsite, artwork, kiosk and the Kempentoren.

Bike path Bels Lijntje

After the last train had crossed the line in 1974, the rails and sleepers were removed and a cycle path was built, which leads from Tilburg via Riel, Alphen, Baarle and Weelde to Turnhout. The cycle path itself is not that special; that is a straight strip of asphalt with exactly three gentle bends. It is the history, the remnants of the railway, the schizophrenic border transition in Baarle-Nassau and Baarle-Hertog, the North Brabant landscape, the Turnhout fens and the Flemish hospitality that make this cycling route enjoyable.

Station Buildings

The stations of Riel and Alphen were closed in 1934, when passenger traffic was discontinued, and demolished in the 1970s, when freight traffic also came to an end. The stations of Baarle and Weelde are still there; they now serve as a wok restaurant and as a residence respectively. By far the largest station was right on the Dutch-Belgian border: a real railway castle with ornate wrought iron, curved windows, stained glass windows and stepped gables. At the border station there was a yard of a total of 23 kilometers of track with a hundred switches – in some places as many as fifty tracks lay side by side. The station building has been demolished, but the island platform it stood on is still there. To give an impression of the enormous size of the 167 meter long station building, replicas of two roof trusses have been placed.

Watchmen’s houses

Everything that is now automated was previously done by hand. The train traffic control did not have a set of computer screens, but sat in a tower and, in addition to the view, relied mainly on information from station masters and track guards. Railway crossings, switches and signals were also operated manually. That required a lot of staff and all those chiefs, watchmen and inspectors had to be ready day and night and therefore live along the railway. There were 28 guard houses on the Dutch part of the Bels Lijntje alone. Many of these have been demolished, but numbers 18, 20, 23, 26 and 27 have been preserved and are now privately occupied.

Turnhout Station

The final stop of the cycle route is Turnhout, the self-proclaimed capital of the Belgian Kempen. Unlike Tilburg’s modernist station, the station here is a beautiful railway castle in Neo-Renaissance style from 1896, complete with natural stone strips between the red bricks, bay windows, turrets, a sturdy station clock in the ridge and a slate roof. That roof previously stood on Antwerp-East station and was moved here when the current Antwerp-Central building was built on that site. Turnhout is a pleasant town to spend a few hours or rather a day. Do you want to stay overnight? Then this is possible next to the station in the Turnhout City Hotel, in a restored monumental railway shed.