Lower Left Rhine Railway
railway line
The Left Lower Rhine line (German: Linksniederrheinische Strecke) is a main line on the left (western) bank of the Rhine in the lower Rhine region of the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, running from Cologne to Cleves (Kleve) and formerly via Kranenburg to Nijmegen in the Netherlands. The Cologne–Krefeld section of the line was opened by the Cöln-Crefeld Railway Company in 1855 and is one of the oldest lines in Germany.
The 55 km-long section from Cologne via Neuss to Krefeld is electrified and continuously multi-track. The subsequent 65 km-long Krefeld–Kleve section is non-electrified and single-track north of Geldern. The section from Kleve to Nijmegen has been closed since 1991.
Rhine-Ruhr S-Bahn line S 11 trains run on the line from Cologne to Neuss, partly on separate S-Bahn track, including a separate loop, partly underground, through the Cologne district of Chorweiler.
History
Cologne–Kleve Section
The Left Lower Rhine line was opened between Cologne and Neuss by the Cologne-Crefeld Railway Company (originally spelt in German as the Cöln-Crefelder Eisenbahn-Gesellschaft, CCE) on 15 November 1855 and extended to Krefeld—on the original direct route via Fischeln—on 26 January 1856. The current route via Krefeld-Oppum was opened on 23 August 1866. The Rhenish Railway Company (Rheinische Eisenbahn-Gesellschaft, RhE) entered into a contract with the Cologne-Crefelder Railway Company on 11 November 1859 to take over its route from Cologne to Krefeld on 1 July 1860, making it possible to extend the Left Lower Rhine line to the north with a connection to the Dutch rail network and the Dutch ports. The section to Kleve opened on 1 March 1863.
The public source identifies “Lower Left Rhine Railway” as railway line. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Lower, Left and Rhine.
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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 Oct 27, 2024. The linked authority identifier is Q878631. Authority coordinates are 51.343, 6.500. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1855, 1991, 1856 and 1866.
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This entry incorporates text from “Lower Left Rhine 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.