Kerkrade-Herzogenrath Revisited

After my conference in Eindhoven, Netherlands was over I decided to revisit a few border places I had been before, as well as a few new ones, on my drive to Luxembourg. Since my previous visit to the region I had acquired a dashboard mount for my video camera (called a Sticky Pod) and this was my first chance to try it out "in the field". I decided to drive up and down the divided road in these two towns, taking video as I went, and providing some commentary as well. I hope that this will provide an even better idea of the place than I was able to with just still photos from my previous trip



If you want to see this in higher quality you will have to go to where it is hosted on the YouTube site


Peter Smaardijk has kindly provided me a couple of links that address some of the questions I raise in the video about what this street used to look like. (For copyright reasons the images displayed here are displayed from the website on which they resided when this log entry was created, i.e. they have not been copied. If they are removed from that website they will not appear here properly).

First the Gemeente Kerkrade page has the following 3 pictures on it:

Here is the pre 1968 situation with barbed wire:



After 1968 there was just a low concrete barrier defining the border.


And, of course, today the road zigs and zags back and forth across the border.



Secondly the http://www.grenzen.150m.com/ site has the following picture which shows the remainder of the concrete barrier as a "monument" in the centre of a roundabout. This is visible at 2:22 and 7:43 of my video.