Verviers – Spa railway line

Verviers Spa
Course book range :	L 44
Route length:	17 km
Gauge :	1435 mm ( standard gauge )
Power system :	3 kV  =
Legend from Aachen 0 Verviers-Central station ( equestrian station ) 25.0 Verviers Matadi 25.5 Verviers Ouest (formerly Verviers-Léopold) Tunnel de Ensival (380 m) 23.5 Ensival Vesdre Vesdre 0.0 Pepinster ( wedge station ) to Liege 0.7 Pepinster-Cité 1.6 Chinheid 3.2 Juslenville 3.8 Theux Marie Louise 4.2 Theux 5.0 Theux Center 5.6 Franchimont 7.4 La Reid 9.6 Marteau 11.2 spa 12.5 Spa-Géronstère (until 2002: Géronstère) to Luxembourg

The Verviers – Spa line (Ligne 44) is a 17 km long branch line in Belgium that is electrified with 3 kV direct current . The line connects Verviers via Pepinster and Theux with the Wasserstadt Spa and previously ran as Ligne 44A via Stavelot to Luxembourg .

route

Verviers Central

Wedge station Pepinster

Theux meeting station

In terms of traffic flows, the line has its starting point at Verviers Central Station ( Verviers Central ) on the Liège – Aachen railway line . As a special feature, this five-track station is designed as a saddle station, which means that the station building, which was built across the tracks, is saddled on top of it .

Ligne 44 initially leads over the double-track Weser Valley line (crossing the Vesdre twice ) to the Pepinster wedge station . There the single-track branch line to Spa branches off from the main line to Liège. Between the platforms of the respective directions (Liège, Aachen, Spa) there is an interesting and lavishly restored station hall, which ensures that you can change trains between trains without getting your feet wet.

After crossing the river Hogne several times - by means of a few small bridge constructions and smaller culverts - and stopping at Pepinster-Cité, Juslenville and Theux , the breakpoint at the Franchimont ruins is reached. In this area, the width of the route and several bridges clearly show that the route was once two-tracked.

From Franchimont the route follows the ever narrowing valley of the Wayai brook and finally reaches the train station of Spa . From 1867, this station had a magnificent cast-iron platform hall, which was demolished in 1971 for the electrification of the line, commensurate with the importance of the global spa. Between this station and today's end point Spa-Géronstère, the railway line has a steep incline and partly leads over a brick viaduct.

At the Spa-Géronstère stop , the line ends on a single track at a buffer stop . The further course of the trackless route since 1973 can still be followed today. It continues to climb via Nivezé and Sart-lez-Spa to Hockai to circle a ridge of the Ardennes in a large arc . As far as the Jalhay / Stavelot municipal boundary (½ km north of the center of Hockai, 11 km from Spa), the route is a forest road partly still interspersed with railway gravel and is not very suitable for cyclists.

From Hockai, the route descends continuously from a height of approx. 530 m to approx. 330 m at the Stavelot branching station. This 13 km long section, which runs directly on the motor sports grounds of Francorchamps and through several deep rock cuttings , was expanded into a cycle path in 2010 (so-called Pré- RaVeL ). The route, which was strongly adapted to the terrain without tunnels or large bridges, doubled the distance between the stations of Spa and Stavelot (25.6 kilometers by rail versus 11.5 kilometers as the crow flies). The following 5 km long and further sloping section from Stavelot to Trois-Ponts (at approx. 250 m altitude) was used by freight trains from Malmedy until October 2006 , but has also been a cycle path since 2010. From the Trois-Ponts branch station to the south, the line has been retained throughout as part of today's IC connection Liège - Luxembourg.

Operation and history

Franchimont stop (1985) before renovation

South of Franchimont Castle, on the left, was the second track

South of the former La Reid station, bridge over the Ru de Chawion

Spa station

Spa-Géronstère stop

Route at Hockai

The line from the Pepinster branch station to Spa was opened in three stages in 1854/55, just 20 years after the first railway in Belgium (and Germany). At this point in time, the core rail network was still emerging in Central Europe, which would later form the main lines of the 20th century. The fact that a branch line, only 12 km long, of mainly local importance, was built so early was due to the fact that the spa town of Spa, at the time a popular destination for upscale circles up to European royalty, feared it would fall behind Chaudfontaine . Chaudfontaine is 17 km west of Verviers and has had a train station on the international main line Brussels - Liège - Aachen - Cologne since 1843 (which was abandoned in 1984 and only reopened on September 3, 2018).

The importance of the line to Spa increased sharply when, in February 1867, Prince Henri de Luxembourg and his wife Princess Amélie opened the Spa - Luxembourg railway line as an extension to the south . Through this new connection (the funds made available came from a Luxembourg company), the industrial area of Verviers (and thus also Aachen) was connected to Luxembourg and its then very important industry via Spa, Stavelot and Trois-Ponts. In 1870 a through car race Liège - Spa - Luxembourg was set up, and freight traffic also flourished.

This heyday lasted only two decades, however, because from 1889 on the Prussian side the Vennbahn from Aachen via Monschau, St. Vith and Ulflingen (Troisvierges) to Luxembourg was continuously passable, and the railway line completed the following year on the Belgian side was much cheaper Rivage – Trois Ponts (the closing of the gap between Liège and Trois-Ponts) brought the old line via Spa and Stavelot a considerable loss of importance in traffic between East Belgium and Luxembourg.

Nevertheless, the importance of the line was still great enough that at least the (Verviers -) Pepinster - Spa section was expanded to double tracks between 1901 and 1903.

The last pre-war timetable from 1914 shows five continuous pairs of trains between Verviers-West (the city's "main station" at the time) and Luxembourg, one of which was an express train with significantly fewer intermediate stops, which covered the 149 km total route in around four hours. There were also three pairs of trains between Verviers-West and Trois-Ponts and, even then, over a dozen pairs of local trains between Verviers-West and Spa. Direct connections beyond Verviers existed with daily through coaches (1st, 2nd and 3rd class) Luxembourg - Pepinster - Brussels (these ran in the pair of express trains mentioned) as well as a daily through coach connection Spa - Verviers - Cöln, which is only offered in summer ( and in the opposite direction).

In the interwar period, there was a trend away from long-distance traffic towards pure local traffic in the northern section. The summer timetable 1935 shows (in the German foreign exchange rate book) 23 trains from the newly built Verviers-Central station to Spa, of which only 7 continue to Trois-Ponts (in the opposite direction 8 of 26 trains). Direct connections beyond Verviers are no longer listed here, only two thirds of the trains already run from / to Verviers-Ost.

During the Second World War , the second Pepinster - Spa track was dismantled by the German occupation and used elsewhere.

The increasing motorization after the war led to a migration of traffic from the rail to the road, especially in rural regions, so that the section south of Spa in particular had little traffic and was finally shut down in 1959 for passenger traffic; Until the end of the 1960s, individual special trains still ran to the car races on the Francorchamps circuit , which is located immediately to the east of the route. Freight traffic south of Spa was also discontinued in the 1960s. Since the closure, the Spa-Géronstère stop, which is located in the southern part of the spa town, has been the end point of the route from Verviers.

The German foreign course books of the 1960s still show no signs of connections beyond Verviers, but instead a range of journeys that are already strongly in the direction of a regular timetable . At that time, hourly intervals or even more dense intervals were already largely common practice with the Dutch State Railways and were also introduced on a number of routes in Belgium, but mostly not to the minute, but with smaller deviations from hour to hour.

As part of a modernization offensive by SNCB , the remaining northern section of the line was given an overhead line, so that electric traction vehicles have been able to run on the line since the timetable change on Sunday, May 23, 1971. (Schweers and Wall name March 22nd as the date, but this was a Monday, so it should be a typo, especially since photos of an opening trip on June 6th exist, see web links.) This made it attractive now, to re-establish direct connections from / to Brussels via the main line electrified years before. In 1978, for example, a daily express train ran with few stops from Mons (from 7.58) via Brussels South (from 8.43) to Spa (at 10.42), which stopped in Pepinster for only 2 minutes and covered the distance from there to Spa non-stop in 12 minutes . This train must have consisted of railcars, since a part of the train to Hasselt was uncoupled when it stopped in Landen and a part that continued as a local train to Welkenraedt at the stop in Liège . This train drove back at 6:22 p.m. from Spa - Brussels South at 8:25 p.m. - Mons on 7/21, only a part of the train from Hasselt was coupled in Landen. In the German foreign course books of the 1970s, this express train appears as the only bold train on the Pepinster - Spa section, with a remarkable consistency in the timetable over the years.

In 1984, train traffic was restructured across Belgium and a relatively strictly adhered to regular timetable was introduced everywhere, including on the route to Spa. In 1985, the train service consisted of 17 pairs of trains plus a morning commuter train Géronstère - Verviers outside the regular times. All of these trains were of type L (local train). In addition, on summer weekends there was still a non-regular direct train Brussels South (7.41) - Spa (9.28) and back Spa (19.11) - Brussels South (21.01); So it had been geared even more towards day-trippers and the time spent in Spa was extended and the overall travel time reduced; he still walked between Pepinster and Spa without stopping. He carried the type T (tourist train). In the second half of the 1980s, this train disappeared from the timetable.

At the end of the 1980s, however, in order to improve the basic offer, the trains from Spa no longer ended in Verviers, but largely continued to Eupen , precisely in the hours in which the (hourly) Intercity from Ostend does not go to Eupen, but was tied to Cologne. The IC went to Cologne every other hour, but there were numerous deviations from this principle. It was only with the introduction of the new Thalys high-speed trains Paris - Brussels - Cologne in 1997, which initially ran every two hours, that there was a strict regularity, through which the hourly IC trains from Ostend always alternate to Cologne (in the hours between the Thalys) or drove to Eupen. As a result, there was an approximate hourly service between Brussels and Cologne.

When the two-hour long-distance trains Oostende - Cologne were replaced by (only) three pairs of trains of the new multi-system ICE, which is compatible with the Belgian electricity system, in December 2002 , all IC services on the Oostende - Verviers route continued to run to Eupen without any deviations. As a result, the regional trains from Spa-Géronstère were no longer consistently continued to Eupen, but only to Welkenraedt . For regional cross-border traffic, the euregioAIXpress was created as a replacement, which ran every two hours between Liège and Aachen (with the Belgian local railcars known from Spa), on the Belgian side this train was called InterRegio (IR).

On December 14, 2014, the concept that is still valid today (as of January 2017) was introduced: every day of the week hourly regional trains run continuously between Spa-Géronstère via Verviers to Aachen Hbf. The (now modernized) electric multiple units are still in use the NMBS / SNCB series AM 62-79 .

literature

• Hans Schweers and Henning Wall: Railways around Aachen . 1st edition. Aachen 1993, ISBN 3-921679-91-5 .

Web links

Commons : SNCB Ligne 44  - Album with pictures, videos and audio files

• History of the route
• Full history of the route
• Pictures of the inauguration of the overhead line
• Route data (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Achim Bartoschek: Description of the cycle path between Spa and Stavelot at bahntrassenradeln.de. Retrieved January 8, 2017 . 
2. ↑ Michel Hanssens and Jean René Lejeune: La Vennbahn (history of the line and its connecting lines, in French) at wallorail.be. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on March 4, 2016 ; accessed on January 13, 2017 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
3. ^ Reichs-Kursbuch, edited in the Kursbureau des Reichs-Postamts, Berlin 1914, reprint 1970, Verlag Ritzau, Pürgen / Landsberg (Lech), table 221 and the through-car notes in table 166
4. ^ Official course book for the Reich - foreign timetables, summer 1935, reprint 1996, Verlag Ritzau, Pürgen, table 803
5. ↑ SNCB / NMBS: Officiele Reisgids / Indicateur Officiel, 1st Bijvoegsel / 1st Supplement, valid from October 1, 1978, table 36
6. ^ Foreign course book of the Deutsche Bundesbahn, winter 1971/72, table 1770
7. ^ Foreign course book of the Deutsche Bundesbahn, summer 1973, table 26000
8. ↑ Foreign course book of the Deutsche Bundesbahn, winter 1976/77, table 26000
9. ^ Foreign course book of the Deutsche Bundesbahn, summer 1979, table 26000
10. ↑ Foreign course book of the Deutsche Bundesbahn, winter 1980/81, table 26000
11. ↑ SNCB / NMBS: Indicateur Chemins de Fer Belges / Spoorboekje Belgische Spoorwegen, valid from June 2, 1985 to May 31, 1986, table 34 (!)
12. ↑ SNCB / NMBS: Spoorboekje Belgische Spoorwegen / Indicateur Chemins de fer belges, valid from May 27, 1990 to June 1, 1991, table 44
13. ↑ SNCB / NMBS: Chemins de fer belges - Indicateur / Belgische Spoorwegen - Spoorboekje, valid from May 23, 1993 to May 28, 1994, table 44