A pair of Sunday excursion trains running between Düsseldorf and Heimbach (Eifel) passed through some of the smaller stations without stopping.

On the morning of 5 September 1937, a serious railway accident occurred in Holzheim station: a special train running from Rommerskirchen with 800 pilgrims on pilgrimage to Kevelaer was derailed.

At the beginning of the 1950s, the new Deutsche Bundesbahn (DB) established the so-called Städteschnellverkehr (city express, S-Zug) semi-fast services on many routes, mainly serving local and regional traffic.

Also a pair of S-Zug services ran between Düren and Düsseldorf on weekday mornings and evenings, stopping only in Elsdorf, Bedburg, Grevenbroich and Neuss.

In the 1960s, during several timetable periods[6] a motorail train ran with sleeping and couchette cars from Avignon to Düsseldorf and return over the Düren–Neuss line on Saturdays in the summer months.

A direct afternoon commuter service from Neuss via Düren to Aachen was also added in the 1960s, but this disappeared a few years later.

The longest regional service was a morning train from Düren via Düsseldorf, Dorsten and Coesfeld to Rheine that ran from June 1980 to May 1982 and was operated with a class VT 24 set, which was very unusual in the area of the cities of Cologne, Düsseldorf and Aachen, but many sets of this class were stationed in Westphalia.

The new S-Bahn line between Mönchengladbach, Neuss, Düsseldorf and Hagen ran every 20 minutes and replaced commuter services on many sections.

The end of the Düren–Bedburg section was approaching, as the redevelopment of the line in the next seven years was foreseen as a result of the expansion of the Hambach surface mine, which was approved in the 1970s.

The trains now ran every hour on the whole line from Neuss to Horrem, but only on weekdays, as there had been no service from Saturday afternoon on the Erft Railway for nearly three decades.

While the last train passed through Bedburg and Elsdorf with public commemorations, speakers and with great expressions of emotions by the population and thus was delayed by 27 minutes, little notice of this event was taken in Düren.

[3] The Düren–Elsdorf section was located in the area of today's Hambach open pit mine and was subsequently dredged for lignite.

In March 2006, the line was between Grevenbroich and Neuss-Holzheim was converted to the new Ks-signals, controlled from the electronic signalling centre in Duisburg.

The crossing at Bahnhofstraße in Holzheim had been equipped with a full barrier and a gatekeeper who visually checked whether the tracks were free of vehicles; this is now done with a radar scanner.

Until the timetable change on 10 December 2017, the RB 38 (Erft-Bahn) operated from Düsseldorf Hauptbahnhof or Neuss (on weekends) via Bedburg to Köln Messe/Deutz.

This service, which is located in the area served by the Verkehrsverbund Rhein-Sieg (Rhine-Sieg Transport association), was shortened to the Bedburg–Cologne section at the timetable change.

At the northern end of the Gustorf station, there is a connection to the extensive factory railway network of RWE Power AG (formerly Rheinbraun).

[7][8][9] Even today, Neusser Eisenbahn trains[10] run between Neuss and Gustorf carrying gypsum, lime or brown coal dust to/from RWE power stations for supply and disposal.

Until the early 1970s, there was also a 1400-ton freight train (Dg 7866) from Brunswick via Neuss to Elsdorf,[12] apparently running to the local sugar factory.

The shunting at the end of trips also involved the single-engine railbuses, which had trailers that could not run at the head of the train because they lacked cabs.

Currently RB 38 services are operated exclusively with class 628 diesel multiple units, mostly as coupled sets with four carriages.

Today in Düren there are connections to the lines towards Aachen and Cologne as well as the Rurtalbahn (RB 21) to Jülich / Linnich and Heimbach, which are now used extensively in both commuter and leisure traffic.

The only striking intermediate point on the approximately 15-kilometer-long line between Elsdorf and Düren was the station of Etzweiler on the eastern edge of the so-called Hambach Forest (Bürgewald) (at line-kilometre 11.2).

Etzweiler station was only used for freight to the Union 103 colliery, which was once the largest underground lignite mine in the world, but was closed in 1955.

In the 1980s, the entrance building of Elsdorf (West) was demolished together with signal box “Ent” on Köln-Aachener Straße and was replaced by a small shelter.

Regular mining work began in 1975/76 and Harff and Kaster stations were abandoned with the relocation of the Erft Railway.

Until the decommissioning of the old section of line on 11 January 1976, it ran from Harff station, through the Tiergarten forest, along the old Erft riverbed and past Kaster.

After Albert-Schweitzer-Straße, which connected to the new district of Morken-Harff for people relocated for mining, the line left Kaster and continued through fields to Lipp and Bedburg.

With the commissioning of the Grevenbroich electronic control centre for the Rheydt–Ehrenfeld line in 2007, the "Gnf" and "Gs" signal boxes became superfluous, but they still exist.

Neuss Hauptbahnhof is home to a number of shops and has been modernised since 2006, including, among other things, the equipping of the platforms with lifts, which can be used by non-wheelchair users.