On 1 January 1870 the first section was opened from Wanne to Münster and on 1 September of the same year its extension to Osnabrück followed.

The line was finally completed on 1 June 1874 with the opening of the remaining sections between Bremen and Harburg.

The old Lengerich tunnel remained out of commission until the Second World War when it was put to use for a while as an underground arms factory.

After the war it was returned to civilian use; at one stage being employed as a rifle range for an arms dealer.

Signs of the four-track upgrade can still be seen from immediately north of the tunnel to the area of Hasbergen in the shape of widened embankments and track overbridges.

On the line between Bremen and Münster the section between Dreye and Kirchweyhe (4.0 km) was upgraded in 1983 for high-speed services.

[3] The expansion of the 287 km long line between Münster and Hamburg, consisting of 195 individual measures, cost 550 million deutschmarks (at 1991 prices).

[4] In June 1986 a third track between Buchholz (branching to the Maschen Marshalling Yard) and Rotenburg went into service,[5] in order to be able to better handle goods and passenger traffic alongside one another.

When the Hamburg-Venlo railway was built, the Hanseatic city of Bremen (like Hamburg) was still not a member of the German Customs Union (Zollverein); in fact this did not happen until 1888.

In order to be able to transport goods from the Rhenish-Westphalian industrial region to Harburg without incurring taxes in the German customs area a treaty-approved goods line was built due east past Bremen which also reduced the journey time considerably because it was almost 13 km shorter than the main route which ran in a loop through Bremen state territory.

The railway is the backbone of rail passenger services between the Ruhr and Hamburg with at least one Intercity pair of trains running per hour.

ICE-Sprinters (and also the former Metropolitan) trains run past Bremen directly to Hamburg in order to save time by using the goods route.

425) is also regularly used by passenger services, especially the two-hourly IC trains from Norddeich Mole via Münster, Wanne-Eickel, Duisburg, Cologne and Koblenz to Luxemburg.