Cologne–Aachen high-speed railway
high-speed railway line in Germany
The Cologne–Aachen high-speed line is the German part of the Trans-European transport networks project high-speed line Paris–Brussels–Cologne. It is not a newly built railway line, but a project to upgrade the existing railway line which was opened in 1841 by the Rhenish Railway Company. When it was continued into Belgium in 1843, it became the world's first international railway line.
The line inside Germany has a length of about 70 kilometres (43 mi). The first 40 km (25 mi) from Cologne to Düren have been rebuilt. Since 2002 the line allows for speeds up to 250 km/h (155 mph). Separate tracks have been built parallel to the high-speed tracks for local S-Bahn traffic. The remaining line from Düren to Aachen allows speeds up to 160 km/h (100 mph) with some slower sections. Upgrades of Düren–Aachen are planned for the near future. In Belgium, the high-speed line is continued as HSL 3.
The public source identifies “Cologne–Aachen high-speed railway” as high-speed railway line in Germany. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Cologne, Aachen and high-speed.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 24, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q264936. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1841, 1843 and 2002.
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This entry incorporates text from “Cologne–Aachen high-speed railway” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.