Notes

The reason why Roermond was on my list is because it’s the main dutch city along the Iron Rhine, a railway line built to connect Germany and Belgium by taking a shortcut through the Netherlands. The line is no longer used in it’s full length today, but the short unused part is still in somewhat good shape. There’s just a lot of greenery that would need to be removed, and interestingly enough, even though the line is physically blocked by some ties that were placed on the rails a little further down the line, the signal is still active.

Thanks to the high safety standards, rewiring a signal box actually costs a lot of money, so there are quite some places where you can still find active signals on lines that are no longer useable (the next one I know of in Germany would be Düren). A side effect of this, however, is that it should be relatively easy to extend the german commuter line RB 39, which currently ends in Dalheim at the dutch/german border, to Roermond, which is actually part of the official german commutter rail plan for the region for 2015. Restoring international freight service, as has been proposed, will be much more difficult, as the line crosses a nature reserve and, in Roermond, passes directly by a lot of private homes.