Rhenish Railway Company

The Rhenish Railway Company (German: Rheinische Eisenbahn-Gesellschaft, RhE) was along with the Cologne-Minden Railway Company (CME) and the Bergisch-Märkische Railway Company (BME) one of the railway companies that in the mid-19th century built the first railways in the Ruhr and large parts of today's North Rhine-Westphalia.

The industrialists of the Rhineland and the Bergisches Land, then part of Prussia, sought to avoid paying the high tolls for using the Rhine imposed by the Netherlands and very early in its development, saw the possibility of the new means of transport, the railway. As early as the 1830s committees were established the cities of the Rhineland to promote proposals for building railways.

Some of the members of the Cologne committee under David Hansemann (1790–1864)—a merchant and banker from Aachen—and the Aachen Committee favoured a railway line through Belgium to the seaport of Antwerp via Liege. Belgium, which had been established as recently as 1830, was interested in trade relations with Prussia, which then included most of the Rhineland. Not having access to the Rhine, Belgium was at a commercial disadvantage to the Netherlands and therefore moved faster than any other country on the continent to build a rail network. The supporters of the line to Antwerp founded the Rhenish Railway Company on 25 July 1835 in Cologne. Its first president was Ludolf Camphausen, who a few years later in 1848 was briefly Prime Minister of Prussia. From 1844 until the company’s nationalisation in 1880, Gustav Mevissen was president of the RhE.

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