Rheinhausen–Kleve railway
German railway line

The Rheinhausen–Kleve railway, also known in German as the Niederrheinstrecke (Lower Rhine Railway), is a formerly continuous railway on the Lower Rhine in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia.
The line between Rheinhausen and Rheinkamp is duplicated and classified as a mainline railway and then continues to Xanten as a single-track branch line. The final section to Kleve has been out of use since 1990. The line to Millingen has overhead electrification.
Name
The Lower Rhine line was built in 1903/04 under the name of the Hippeland-Express by the Prussian state railways. "Hippe" means goat in the Lower Rhine dialect, a typical domestic animal in the Lower Rhine. The name of the line reflected the rustic nature of the area at the end of the line.
Route
The line, which was officially opened in 1904, starts at Rheinhausen station, where it separated at an at-grade junction from the Osterath–Dortmund Süd railway, which was built by the former Rhenish Railway Company (Rheinische Eisenbahn-Gesellschaft, RhE). This line connects with Duisburg Central Station.
Within the current city limits of Duisburg, it crossed in Trompet station at grade the former route of the Duisburg-Ruhrort–Mönchengladbach railway, which was built by the Aachen-Düsseldorf-Ruhrort Railway, which was taken over by the Bergisch-Märkische Railway Company (Bergisch-Märkische Eisenbahn-Gesellschaft, BME) in 1866.
“Rheinhausen–Kleve railway” enters the record as german railway line. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Rheinhausen, Kleve and railway can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Nov 6, 2024. The linked authority identifier is Q1988390. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1990, 1903, 1904 and 1866.
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This entry incorporates text from “Rheinhausen–Kleve 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.