History of rail transport in Belgium

In 1829, the British-Belgian industrialist John Cockerill tried to obtain a concession from the Dutch king William I to build a railway line from Brussels to Antwerp[citation needed], without success.

In 1831, a proposal to build a railway between Antwerp and Cologne (in neighbouring Prussia) which would link the industrializing Ruhr and Meuse valleys with the ports of the Scheldt was considered by the Chamber of Representatives but was eventually rejected.

[2][3] In August 1831, however, the government launched a big scale survey (under the supervision of Pierre Simons and Gustave de Ridder) of potential sites for railways which, it was hoped, would help to regenerate the Belgian economy.

[4] Particularly in liberal circles, it was felt that railways would not serve a purely economic function, but were also necessary part of forging Belgian national identity.

The engineer George Stephenson travelled on the first train between Brussels-Mechelen in 1835, and his company provided the first three locomotives (based on the Rocket design)[a] used on the line.

[10] The success of the railways both intensified Belgian industrialisation and consolidated Antwerp's position as one of Europe's pre-eminent ports.

In the winter of 1868, against a background of French threats to Belgium and Luxembourg under the rule of Napoleon III, the French Compagnie des chemins de fer de l'Est attempted to buy up numerous railway lines situated in southern and eastern Belgium in the provinces of Liège, Limburg and Luxembourg.

[11] The Belgian state, under Leopold II, felt that the takeover presented a military and political threat and intervened to stop the sale in 1869.

During the German occupation in World War II, the SNCB-NMBS was forced to participate in the deportation of Belgian Jews to camps in Eastern Europe as part of the Holocaust.

In 2005, the NMBS/SNCB was split up into three parts, to facilitate future liberalisation of railway freight and passenger services in agreement with European regulations.

The first Belgian-built locomotive, named Le Belge, was built under licence by John Cockerill & Cie. (the foremost Belgian industrial manufacturing firm at the time) according to a design licensed by Robert Stephenson & Co. in 1835.

Led by firms such as Cockerill, Belgium became a major centre of locomotive design and manufacture before World War II.