The National Railway Company of Belgium is the national railway company of Belgium. The company formally styles itself using the Dutch and French abbreviations NMBS/SNCB. The corporate logo designed in 1936 by Henry van de Velde consists of the linguistically neutral letter B in a horizontal oval.
History
NMBS/SNCB is an autonomous government company, formed in 1926 as successor to the Belgian State Railways. In 2005, the company was split up into three parts: Infrabel, which manages the railway infrastructure, network operations and network access, the public railway operator NMBS/SNCB itself to manage the freight and passenger services, and NMBS/SNCB-Holding, which owns both public companies and supervises the collaboration between them. Essentially, this was a move to facilitate future liberalisation of railway freight and passenger services in agreement with European regulations. Several freight operators have since received access permissions for the Belgian network. In February 2011, NMBS/SNCB Logistics began operating as a separate business. Faced with rising losses, in June 2012, the Belgian transport minister announced further reform: NMBS/SNCB Holding would be split up, so NMBS/SNCB would be separate from Infrabel. Unions oppose the reform. NMBS/SNCB-Holding was merged into SNCB in 2014 in order to simplify the structure of the Belgian railways. NMBS/SNCB holds a Royal Warrant from the Court of Belgium.
Operations
In 2008 NMBS/SNCB carried 207 million passengers a total of 8,676 million passenger-kilometres over a network of 3,536 kilometres. In 2017, that number rose to 230 million passengers carried, and Belgium has a rail network of 3,602 km of main railway lines. The network currently includes four high speed lines suitable for traffic: HSL 1 runs from just south of Brussels to the French border, where it continues to a triangular junction with LGV Nord for and , HSL 2 runs from to and onward to, HSL 3 runs from Liège to the German border near Aachen and HSL 4 connects with HSL-Zuid in the Netherlands to allow services to run from to.
