Friday 6 July 2007

Vennbahn: The "German Farm" (Rückschlag)

After breakfast I set off to investigate further north. The two maps below give the German and the Belgian perspective on the area respectively (as well as providing a reference point to relate this area to the Andreaskreuz level crossing). This is the German map:

Foolishly I failed to investigate in detail the short piece of road marked ""Where is the border?" on these maps, although I did drive along it, blithely believing that I had driven into and back out of Belgium at the time. My recollection is that there was a change that made this evident but I cannot be certain and, as you can see, the two maps are inconsistent in how they mark the border. This is the Belgian map:

I turned off the L106 and went along the residential street in Aderich, crossing back to the west side of the tracks just south of the "German Farm" (Rückschlag) enclave at Entenpfuhl (= "Duck Pond"). This photo is looking north along the tracks, my car is parked on the side of the road having crossed back into Belgium.


This photo is looking from the Belgian side back down the road into Aderich. It is a residential street all the way up to the rail lines.


A very short distance further north I encountered the south-eastern corner of the enclave and its border marker which I photographed from 3 angles.

The Belgian side:


The top - clearly showing the 90° turn in the border:


The German side


Looking along the road to the north - farmhouse in the background:


...and a video of the area.



Moving up the road now to the north-east corner of the enclave we find border stone 759


The "T" marking on the top is rather strange - it should really be a "V" mark like at the south east corner I would have thought.

I took a couple of short videos around here. It really seems that this doesn't have a lot to do with the Vennbahn directly since the road is in Belgium as well and so is irrelevant as far as the railway is concerned, being separated from the rail lines by a fairly significant chunk of wood/scrub land






Next - the former Konzen station and the German B258 road that runs through Belgium to the Fringshaus.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

The "German Farm" actually is no farm, but the house of the artist Dieter Call,

Greetings

Wolfgang Schaub

www.gipfel-und-grenzen.eu

Anonymous said...

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Keep up the superb work!

Anonymous said...

Hi,

This is a message for the webmaster/admin here at borderhunting.blogspot.com.

May I use some of the information from this blog post right above if I give a link back to your site?

Thanks,
Jack

Hugh said...

@Jack - sure

Anonymous said...

Hello there,

Thanks for sharing this link - but unfortunately it seems to be not working? Does anybody here at borderhunting.blogspot.com have a mirror or another source?


Cheers,
Oliver

Hugh said...

The .eu site redirects to http://www.gipfel-und-grenzen.de/ quite successfully for me

ZoNi said...

Hugh, can I use your photo ( http://bp1.blogger.com/_LcDIqvQ5-rc/RqdhUwGxkYI/AAAAAAAAAUM/XDfmG5PD-s4/s1600-h/DSCN2741.JPG ) in my book about strange geography, including enclaves? If yes, what attribution would you like me to write bellow your photo?

Best regards
Zoran, Serbia

Hugh said...

@Zoran - sure - I think you have used some of my photos before (Estonia/Russia IIRC) so just use the same attribution you did then