Geilenkirchen station

Geschichte

Geilenkirchen station is in Geilenkirchen in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia on the Aachen–Mönchengladbach railway. It is the only railway station in the town of Geilenkirchen. It provided an interchange between the mainline railway and the Geilenkirchen District Railway (Geilenkirchener Kreisbahn) until 1971 and was a stop for long-distance traffic until 2001. It is classified by Deutsche Bahn as a category 4 station.Geilenkirchen station has an entrance building that includes a waiting room, a ticket office and a fast food restaurant.InfrastructureGeilenkirchen station has three platform tracks for passengers. All tracks are used by scheduled trains. Two Euregiobahn services terminate and reverse at platform track 3 on weekday mornings. Furthermore, there is a siding for WestEnergie und Verkehr GmbH (the municipal electrical and transport company of the Heinsberg district). Freight wagons, mostly hauled to the siding by locomotives of class 294, are regularly unloaded there. During construction on the line the siding is also used by work trains, such as during the works in relation to the connections to the electronic interlocking in Grevenbroich in October 2007.SignallingUp to 5 November 2007, the dispatcher at Geilenkirchen signal box Gf controlled three crossings, turnouts and the signals in the station. On 5 November 2007, this task was taken over by the Grevenbroich electronic signalling centre at the completion of its second phase of construction. After numerous acts of vandalism at the abandoned signal boxes between Rheydt and Ubach-Palenberg, the doors to all signal boxes on the section, including Geilenkirchen, were replaced with security doors and the boxes’ windows were secured with perforated plates in November 2009.