North Line (Denmark)

Nordbanen is one of six radial S-train lines in Copenhagen. It connects Copenhagen with the city of Hillerød, and with several northern suburbs.

The basic service consists of service B which stops at all stations until Holte, and E which runs with limited stops until Holte and then stops at all stations until Hillerød.

Between 1950 and 1989 rush-hour and limited-stop on the radial ran under service letters C, Cc and Cx. Service A ran on Nordbanen from 1979 to 2007, first as the stopping service until Holte and later (from 1989) as the limited-stop service to Hillerød.

Nordbanen was the second railway to reach Copenhagen in 1863. It was originally the main line to Elsinore before the more direct Kystbanen opened in 1897. The section from Hillerød to Elsinore still exists and is today the Little North Line operated by the railway company Lokaltog.

South of Hellerup the original Nordbanen followed a much more westerly route than the current line, taking it along the present ring line alignment to Ryparken and thence through Nørrebro to the 1863-1911 central station at present-day Kampmannsgade. The trains to Holte and Hillerød moved to the current line in 1921, but the old alignment was used by freight trains until 1930 and still leaves clear traces on a modern street map.

The line from Hellerup to the new central station had four tracks of which trains on Nordbanen used the two western ones and trains on Kystbanen used to two eastern ones. In 1928 two new tracks for local trains to Klampenborg were added to Kystbanen; these connected to Nordbanen's tracks at Hellerup. Thus when the first S-trains were introduced on the Klampenborg line in 1934 it was the Nordbanen tracks between København H and Hellerup that were electrified. But then plans to also electrify Nordbanen as far as Holte were already underfoot.

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Wikipedia