History of rail transport in Belgium

Belgium was heavily involved in the early development of rail transport. Belgium was the second country in Europe, after Great Britain, to open a railway and produce locomotives. The first line, between the cities of Brussels and Mechelen opened in 1835. Belgium was the first state in Europe to create a national rail network and the first to possess a nationalized railway system. The network expanded fast as Belgium industrialised, and by the early 20th century was increasingly under state-control. The nationalized railways, under the umbrella organization National Railway Company of Belgium (NMBS/SNCB), retained their monopoly until liberalization in the 2000s.

Attempts to build railways in Belgium significantly predated the establishment of the first line. 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, without success. Shortly after the independence of Belgium from the Netherlands after the Belgian Revolution of 1830, a debate opened on the desirability of establishing public railway lines using the steam locomotives recently developed in England, where the had been completed in 1825.

Following the Belgian Revolution of 1830, when Belgium split from the Netherlands, Belgium became a key site of railway development. 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. In August 1831, however, the government launched a big scale survey of potential sites for railways which, it was hoped, would help to regenerate the Belgian economy. 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.

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