The First Train From Antwerp to Cologne Leaves Monday

Antwerp and Cologne sit roughly 140 miles apart, in neighbouring countries, on some of the densest rail infrastructure in Europe. Until this week, getting between them meant changing at Brussels or Liege and hoping the connection held. From Monday 7 September, Deutsche Bahn and Belgian operator SNCB begin running an ICE straight through, twice a day in each direction, and the two cities have a direct train for the first time. The scheduled journey time is about two hours and 25 minutes, which is competitive with driving and does not involve a border queue, a rental counter or the Ring around Brussels at five in the evening.

The routing is the interesting part. Trains call at Antwerpen-Centraal, Brussels Airport-Zaventem, Leuven, Liege-Guillemins, Aachen Hauptbahnhof and Cologne Hauptbahnhof. That puts Brussels Airport directly on a German high-speed line for the first time, which is the piece the airlines care about. Deutsche Bahn has paired the launch with Brussels Airlines on integrated rail-and-air ticketing, so a passenger flying long-haul out of Zaventem can book the train leg as part of the itinerary rather than as a separate gamble. It is the same substitution logic that killed Brussels-Frankfurt as a short-haul flight a decade ago, applied one city further west.

For travellers the practical gain is a new way into the Rhineland that skips Brussels-Midi entirely. Antwerp has been an awkward starting point for anyone heading east: excellent domestic connections, thin international ones outside the Thalys and Eurostar corridor through the capital. A direct ICE gives the city its own artery into Germany and, by extension, into the wider DB network at Cologne, where onward trains reach Frankfurt, Hamburg and Berlin without a further change of operator. Aachen also gains, picking up a second daily pair of services toward the Belgian coast side of the map.

The launch is one strand of a broader Deutsche Bahn push into Belgium this year, which also included a summer ICE service to the North Sea coast at Ostend. DB has said it plans a substantially heavier Frankfurt-Brussels timetable alongside the new Antwerp working, which would make the German-Belgian corridor one of the busier cross-border high-speed arteries in Europe. Two trains a day is a modest start and clearly a test of demand rather than a statement of confidence. Whether it grows depends on how many travellers turn out to have wanted this connection all along.

Sources: Railway-News, Travel Tomorrow