[3] By the 1880s, the pace of railway construction ground to a halt due to economic and political problems.

The Trunk Line was first formally acquired in 1926, despite having formed a central part of the network for half a century.

[5] In January 1942, NSB gave the "green light for putting prisoners of war (POWs) to work on the construction of the Nordland Line.

The POWs were forced to perform labour under conditions that were inhumane, and [Bjørn] Westlie, author of the 2015 book, Fangene som forsvant ("The Prisoners Who Disappeared"), shows that NSB was fully informed about the prisoners' situation", according to a 2015 Klassekampen article.

[7] Over 1,000 died as a result of [the] cold,[7] starvation and exhaustion (out of a total of 13,700 dead "foreign POWs, political prisoners and forced laborers" in Norway between 1941 and 1945).

[12] In 2002 the freight operations were split to the subsidiary CargoNet, and the maintenance department became[citation needed] Mantena.