Regionalverkehr Münsterland (RVM) operates freight traffic over the section between Rheine and Spelle.

To be competitive, the line in the Münsterland and the area between Rheine and Quakenbrück had to run as far as possible without major diversions and had to pass to the west of the ridge of the Teutoburg Forest in order to reduce transport costs and travel times.

This would give the new connection a financial advantage over its competitor's line, which had run to the east through Osnabrück and Diepholz in order to avoid the area of the Oldenburg State Railways.

The Rhenish Railway Company, however, wished specifically to connect to the network of the Grand Duchy of Oldenburg State Railways in Quakenbrück, in order to make a continuous connection to both the Hanseatic city of Bremen and to Wilhelmshaven (which had been under development as a base of the Prussian Navy since 1866).

The construction of the branch to Salzbergen was not completed and was abandoned under a ministerial order on 31 March 1879 as a result of the nationalisation of the line.

The line had military importance during the First World War due to the extensive coal shipments from the Ruhr to the naval base in Wilhelmshaven.

At the end of the Second World War in 1945, all the bridges over the Rhine–Herne Canal and the Emscher river were blown up by the Wehrmacht.

Traffic on the Quakenbrück route was not resumed until the summer of 1945, but only between Spelle and Quakenbrück because the Ems bridge in Rheine (between Rheine station and Altenrheine station) and the bridge over the Dortmund-Ems canal between Altenrheine and Spelle had not been rebuilt.

From here, the Tecklenburg Northern Railway (Tecklenburger Nordbahn), a former light railway connecting Piesberg (near Osnabrück) and Rheine) ran a shuttle to Rheine-Stadtberg station and from there through the town centre to Hues-Ecke station (Lingener Str./Emsstraße) on the right (north) bank of the Ems so as to temporarily maintain the connection from Quakenbrück to Rheine.

The Dorsten–Coesfeld section is now part of Deutsche Bahn’s Münster-Ostwestfalen (East Westphalia) regional network, which has its headquarters in Münster.

[4] It is planned to replace these with electric trains capable running from overhead line and batteries in a few years.

On the section between Coesfeld and Rheine, passenger services were abandoned on 29 September 1984 and freight traffic ended on 1 January 1993.

[2] The first sod for the construction of the Munsterland cycling track was turned at St. Arnold station on 16 December 2008.

Today, the relatively large signal boxes in Beesten and Fürstenau are still a reminder on the extensive train operations in the recent past.

Traffic essentially consists of sand, gravel and materials for the manufacture of precast concrete destined for the Rekers cement works in Spelle (about 8,000 wagon loads per year) and agricultural machinery dispatched from Maschinenfabrik Bernard Krone in Spelle.