Vennbahn: The World’s Weirdest Border?

Hidden away in the rolling Eifel hills is one of the world’s weirdest international borders: a long, string-shaped piece of Belgium that runs through western Germany. Why is it there, and what does it have to do with an abandoned railway? I went to investigate the story of the Vennbahn…

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Hello it’s April 2019 and I’m in Belgium and now I’m in Germany and if we just get to the other side of the road now I’m back in Belgium again but those buildings through the trees they’re in Germany so one earth is going on here and more importantly what has it got to

Do with this abandoned railway line welcome to the borderline insanity of the Fen bar This is the town of Mon Chou in western Germany it’s a gorgeous little place sitting in a valley overlooked by a thirteenth century castle with a perfectly preserved medieval centre full of historic half-timbered houses and quaint little shops selling traditional arts and crafts and of course the reason

We’re here is absolutely nothing to do with any of that here’s Mon Chou on a map what I’ve come to see is one of the world’s weirdest international borders no not that one this one why is there a spaghetti shaped bit of Belgium inside Germany well

There’s no way I’m not going to go and investigate that so we’re gonna climb out of the town a little bit and then follow this bubbling brook upwards through some woodland until the GPS on my phone tells me that the spaghetti is just over there looks like it’s on top

Of this embankment I wonder what we’ll find up here ha I hate to say it but this looks an awful lot like a disused railway what the chances are that what we’ve stumbled across here is the former route of the Fen railway or in German the Fen bun an old railway line that

Used to run from arkin in Germany to 12 years in Luxembourg it was built by the Germans in the 1880s to carry passengers iron ore and coal and it did this in a fairly serene and uneventful way for 30 years until someone shot an Austrian and everyone decided that the best thing to

Do next would be to have a war this is what Germany looked like at the start and I don’t want to spoil the ending if you haven’t seen the film but this is what it looked like afterwards the Treaty of Versailles gave away huge tracts of land including this bit which

Went to Belgium and yes some of you are there already that just happened to be the same little bit of Germany that had the Fenn barn in it so the Fenn barn was now in Belgium but just to complicate things not quite all of it the sections around Mon Chou and

Rickon was still in Germany luckily back then just like nowadays everyone was pretty chilled out about international borders and it didn’t really matter oh no wait Germany argued this relva is ours we have built it it is in Germany it is very logical and Belgium turned

Round and said what you’re on about me it starts in Belgium it ends in Belgium it’s got Belgium trains on it it’s flippin Belgium the dispute wasn’t resolved until 1922 four years after the end of the war when an International Commission ruled that the track bed the railway and its buildings all belonged

To Belgium so I think about is right I’m standing in Belgium that’s Germany that’s Germany and that bridge that links Germany Germany is Belgium this had the unintended but unavoidable effect of creating five exclaves of Germany separated from the rest of the country by the railway line Munster

Bilgin Rick and Forrest Luke Schlag which is literally just someone’s house mutiny and wreaths off the two countries enforced customs controls at the beginning and end of the section and passengers and goods bound for Belgian destinations were placed in special vehicles that could be temporarily locked to keep them on the

Train until they were safely back in Belgium again an apart from a period in World War two when Germany briefly regained control of the whole line that’s how things stayed until the 1970s when belgian decided to basically stop serving the german stations which simplified things but with passengers

And freight diverting to other routes the line began to be neglected and by the time you freedom of movement arrived in the 1990s and effectively removed the border problem there was hardly any traffic left anyway the Fen ban was eventually shut down at the end of 2001

Most of the evidence of the former railway has gone now and the route has been turned into a long distance path for cyclists and hikers but here at Cal to hairbag where the line rejoins the rest of Belgium at the southern end you’ll find an old station and the start

Of 7 kilometres of remaining track they don’t run trains from here anymore but entertainingly you can instead pedal your way down the line on a rail bike it looks like a lot of fun and I was all set to jump on one of them before being politely advised that they’re quite

Heavy they’re a lot of effort and really they’re designed for groups and families if like me you’re neither a group nor a family you can at least console yourself with a tremendous selection of waffles from the buffet car or pop back over to the German side of the road and get some

Schnitzel from Biggie’s after that my stomach was almost as heavy as a rail bike so I hopped on a bus back up the line and if you look carefully out of the window here you can just about not quite see the single exclave house a true clog which remains separated from

The rest of Germany because even though the railways been gone for nearly 20 years now Belgium seems quite happy to keep the land the bus dropped me back at the same place where I started the video the old station at Rokan where a particularly squiggly section of the

Border means that you can jog across two whole countries in about 15 seconds brings a whole new meaning to the phrase cross country run but whether you’re here for the running or the railway history the biking or the rail biking or you just really like collecting text messages from phone

Networks welcoming you to their country there’s no place on earth quite like the Fen bar you