The Cologne Railway Committee presented a draft route that would bypass Aachen to reduce costs: the line would run from Eschweiler to Kornelimünster along the Inde and from there to the Belgian border.

[4] On 6 April 1836, a conference of representatives of the traders of Aachen and Cologne in Jülich, chaired by the Oberpräsident of the Rhine Province Ernst von Bodelschwingh, could not resolve to the railway dispute.

Prussian king Frederick William III decided on 12 February 1837 that the line would run through Aachen and thus ended the railway dispute.

[8] To this end, open and closed carriages and wagons were delivered by Waggonfabrik Talbot of Aachen using road transport at the beginning of the year.

Initially, the line was single-track and the timetable was set up so that trains leaving from Aachen and Cologne crossed at the multi-track Düren station.

[9] According to a report by Gustav von Mevissen, the president of the Rhenish Railway Company on 20 May 1845, the volume of traffic on the line between Cologne and Aachen exceeded the expectations of the planners in the early years.

As a result of the opening of the line, the EBV's transport costs fell by two-thirds and contracts were also concluded with the Rhenish Railway Company for coal deliveries to supply its steam locomotives.

France intended to transport raw materials via this line from the Ruhr, which was also occupied, but the German railway workers refused to work with them as passive resistance.

During the occupation, the line was blocked to regular traffic several times so that French crews could operate coal trains from the Ruhr to France without having to observe German signalling and rail regulations.

A serious railway accident occurred in the resulting cutting on 27 May 1983 when an express crashed into a landslide at a speed of 130 km/h (80 mph) after heavy rainfall.

With the change of timetable in May 1966, electric train operations commenced on the Cologne–Aachen–Liège route, using the standard Belgium system (3000 V DC) from Aachen.

The planning approval procedure for the second section, which includes passing tracks and increased speeds, was initiated at the Federal Railway Authority in August 2014.

The project is funded by the EU as part of the TEN initiative under the acronym PBKAL (Paris, Brussels, Cologne, Amsterdam, London).

[32] The investment framework plan for federal transport infrastructure of 2010 (Investitionsrahmenplan bis 2010 für die Verkehrsinfrastruktur des Bundes) specified total costs of €951.7 million (as of 2006) for new construction and upgrading between Cologne and the German-Belgian border (including the Busch Tunnel).

When the Cathedral Bridge made it possible for trains to cross the Rhine in 1859, the line ran to the Centralbahnhof (central station).

The station has a partially covered island platform, which is connected by two sets of stairs and a lift to the street below, on which there is a Kölner Verkehrsbetriebe (Cologne Transport) bus stop.

For excursion guests from downtown Cologne, a small station building that housed a restaurant was built on a hill north of the cutting through which the line ran.

The station building north of the railway line still exists, but no longer has a platform and is currently used as a taxi control centre.

The masonry was continuously damaged by seepage and exhaust gases from the steam locomotives, so that the tunnel was in great need of restoration at the beginning of the 1930s.

About a kilometre south of the village, but still part of Gürzenich, there is a Bundeswehr depot where weapons and material were stored mainly for the Air Force airbase in Nörvenich, about 15 km (9.3 mi) away.

When this section of the line was converted to computer-based interlocking technology, the Derichsweiler overtaking loops were abandoned and the points and the catenary on the passing tracks were dismantled.

In the Second World War, an arch was blown up and initially replaced by American pioneers with a temporary steel structure and then restored to its original design in 1950.

[59] Due to the location outside the centre of the town at line-km 60.3, there were large open areas that made it possible to develop Stolberg Hauptbahnhof into a railway junction.

Since then, Aachen Hauptbahnhof has had nine platform tracks, four of which are designed to enable the transition between electrical systems: the overhead lines can be switched to use either the 15 kV/16.7 Hz AC used in Germany or the 3 kV DC used in Belgium.

The Carolus Magnus was built by the newly founded Dobbs & Poensgen locomotive factory in Aachen, but it was prone to failure and had to be rebuilt.

[67] The original timetable provided three passenger trains (morning, noon and evening) between Cologne and Aachen per day and direction.

The first trains from Cologne to Paris were initially unlit, but lamps were eventually attached to the locomotives after an accident at a level crossing.

In 1913, there were also direct through coaches from Aachen via the line to Cologne, Berlin, Bremen, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Hanover, Kiel, Munich and Wiesbaden.

The Regional-Express services RE 1 (NRW-Express) and RE 9 (Rhein-Sieg-Express) serve the entire length of the line hourly and together provide an approximately 30-minute cycle.

Much of the freight traffic is carried by DB Cargo and Cobra (Corridor Operations Belgium Rail), a subsidiary of Deutsche Bahn, and SNCB.