Die Schwesternstädte an dem Strand' des Rheins,
Köln, Bonn und Koblenz, Bingen, gold'nes Mainz,
Auf's neu verbunden durch die Eisenbahn.The sister cities of the Rhine,
Cologne, Bonn and Koblenz, Bingen, and golden Mainz,
now newly joined by railway.
A celebratory poem for the opening of the Left Rhine Railway in 1859.
Though there are some notable exceptions, a celebratory poem for a freshly opened railway is a rare phenomenon. The Left Rhine Railway’s rare mix of scenery, history and trains of every type and size justifies well this eventual foreshadowing by the unnamed poet. For generations, the premier trains of international European railways took this corridor to gain access to the North and Western-most parts of the mainland. The Trans-Europ-Express Rheingold is by far the most famous of these old workings in my mind. But even today, the NightJet from Vienna to Cologne takes this slower mainline offering an incredible sunrise along the Rhine when the time of year is right.
Before 2003, this line was the principal route for the busy Cologne-Frankfurt operation of Deutsche Bahn – and severely overloaded with an incredibly mixed working. Today however, with the high-speed line 50 km east of the river, the once broad mix of trains found in the 1990s has shifted towards freight and to local trains. But there is still a fantastic rag tag of an hourly ICE, seemingly every type of European freight train from SBB to DB Cargo Nederland, and slow diesel Regionalbahnen fighting for space on the line. My journey down from Cologne was on a near-vintage ICE 2, and my return was on the very early InterCity from Koblenz to Dresden. This strange train runs via Wuppertal, the Ruhrgebiet, and through Braunschweig and then Saxony to reach its destinations in a rather unambitious 8 hours (notwithstanding the delays). Whether you are sitting in the ICE Bordbistro, or in the upper deck of a Doppelstock InterCity, the view is remarkable. Sitting upstairs elevated my view and cut out the annoyances of low-lying buildings and cars in the towns.
From Cologne you can take the train south to the former West German capital, Bonn, pass through historic Remagen (famous for the remains of the Ludendorff Bridge across the Rhine, destroyed in 1945) and then south to Koblenz, where the Moselle River meets the Rhine. Both regional trains take roughly an hour to traverse this 100 km section of the Rhine. Though the train takes an hour, a day of hopping on and hopping off is well worth your time.
Unlike south of Koblenz, where the Rhine is in a narrow gorge, here it is broader, more open and more wild. The river is a busy working corridor: from the Regionalbahn window you’ll see cargo barges and Rhine river cruisers snaking up the water every few minutes. Once you’ve left the suburbs south of Bonn, the scenery grows in quality. The forested Siebengebirge (or ‘Seven Mountains’ in English), a group of oddly shaped volcanic hills, starts to loom over the river about ten minutes south of Bonn Hauptbahnhof. To keep along its narrow path between the water and hills, the train has to work to bend gradually as the wide river aggressively thrusts left and right through the valley created by these volcanic hills. Even in the winter months, the river view from this point south to Koblenz is a kaleidoscope of deep blues, broad greens and regular specks of historic half-timbered houses, in the local Rhenish vernacular architecture.
Of particular interest to ERT writers and readers alike is the rail heritage of this route. The Drachenfelsbahn, Germany’s oldest cog railway, is a ferry ride across the Rhine away. This small railway uses historic 1950s trains to climb the Drachenfels (‘Dragon’s Rock’ in English) that sits on the eastern bank of the river. Once reached, the summit is an impressive place for a beer or food, with views over the Rhine and its vineyards. From the Left Rhine Line, you have to leave the train at Melheim and get the ferry across to Königswinter to pick up the rack railway for the climb up the side of the Rhine valley hills.
But it is this weirdness in the first instance, and the fact that the train line is a very busy functional corridor even despite being bypassed in the second, that makes the line so appealing. In the Bordbistro of my ICE down from Cologne, an older gentleman, clearly retired, reminisced about how his days as a conscript in Cologne were marked by the shuttling between his home in Frankfurt and his barracks in the Ruhr looking out the same train window as he was doing now. This route, shown as Timetable No. 802 in the Timetable, does offer spectacular views and of course a chain of pretty chocolate-box small cities and attractions, but to me it offers a story of German rail. The glory days of the Bundesbahn and its innovations along the core route on the Hamburg-Cologne-Frankfurt-Munich axis.
Though there are sections of the rail route along the Rhine from Cologne to Frankfurt that offer a more spectacular backdrop, it’s this busy, heavily worked pair of tracks that run up its western bank between Koblenz and Cologne that are a truly special place for that reason. I enjoy taking the train for scenery. But the true gift is when you are taking a journey for the simple reason of getting from A to B, and the railway delivers a spectacular backdrop – making an otherwise perfunctory trip on public transport into a spectacle worth getting off your phone and getting a look out the window for.
For wine lovers, this route also offers a great deal to do. The Rotweinwanderweg (Red Wine Trail, a marked footpath through the vineyards) starts at Bad Bodendorf railway station. A train change at Remagen onto the Ahrtalbahn is generally needed but there are now direct trains from Koblenz. The Ahr Valley grows mostly Spätburgunder — Pinot Noir to English speakers — despite being unusually far north for the grape.
For those not taking the ICE, I recommend the slower RB26 to slow the pace to something more languid and allow you to take the views in fully instead of turning the beautiful into a passing blur.
Just make sure to sit on the correct side: next to the river demands sitting on the left heading south, and on the right heading north.
