hello it's April 2019 and I'm in Belgium
and now I'm in Germany and if we just
get to the other side of the road now
I'm back in Belgium again but those
buildings through the trees they're in
Germany so one earth is going on here
and more importantly what has it got to
do with this abandoned railway line
welcome to the borderline insanity of
the Fen bar
[Music]
this is the town of Mon Chou in western
Germany
it's a gorgeous little place sitting in
a valley overlooked by a thirteenth
century castle with a perfectly
preserved medieval centre full of
historic half-timbered houses and quaint
little shops selling traditional arts
and crafts and of course the reason
we're here is absolutely nothing to do
with any of that
here's Mon Chou on a map what I've come
to see is one of the world's weirdest
international borders no not that one
this one why is there a spaghetti shaped
bit of Belgium inside Germany well
there's no way I'm not going to go and
investigate that so we're gonna climb
out of the town a little bit and then
follow this bubbling brook upwards
through some woodland until the GPS on
my phone tells me that the spaghetti is
just over there looks like it's on top
of this embankment I wonder what we'll
find up here ha I hate to say it but
this looks an awful lot like a disused
railway what the chances are that what
we've stumbled across here is the former
route of the Fen railway or in German
the Fen bun an old railway line that
used to run from arkin in Germany to 12
years in Luxembourg it was built by the
Germans in the 1880s to carry passengers
iron ore and coal and it did this in a
fairly serene and uneventful way for 30
years until someone shot an Austrian and
everyone decided that the best thing to
do next would be to have a war this is
what Germany looked like at the start
and I don't want to spoil the ending if
you haven't seen the film but this is
what it looked like afterwards
the Treaty of Versailles gave away huge
tracts of land including this bit which
went to Belgium and yes some of you are
there already that just happened to be
the same little bit of Germany that had
the Fenn barn in it
so the Fenn barn was now in Belgium but
just to complicate things not quite all
of it the sections around Mon Chou and
Rickon was still in Germany
luckily back then just like nowadays
everyone was pretty chilled out about
international borders and it didn't
really matter
oh no wait Germany argued this relva is
ours we have built it it is in Germany
it is very logical and Belgium turned
round and said what you're on about me
it starts in Belgium it ends in Belgium
it's got Belgium trains on it it's
flippin Belgium the dispute wasn't
resolved until 1922 four years after the
end of the war when an International
Commission ruled that the track bed the
railway and its buildings all belonged
to Belgium so I think about is right I'm
standing in Belgium that's Germany
that's Germany and that bridge that
links Germany Germany is Belgium this
had the unintended but unavoidable
effect of creating five exclaves of
Germany separated from the rest of the
country by the railway line Munster
Bilgin Rick and Forrest Luke Schlag
which is literally just someone's house
mutiny and wreaths off
the two countries enforced customs
controls at the beginning and end of the
section and passengers and goods bound
for Belgian destinations were placed in
special vehicles that could be
temporarily locked to keep them on the
train until they were safely back in
Belgium again an apart from a period in
World War two when Germany briefly
regained control of the whole line
that's how things stayed until the 1970s
when belgian decided to basically stop
serving the german stations which
simplified things but with passengers
and freight diverting to other routes
the line began to be neglected and by
the time you freedom of movement arrived
in the 1990s and effectively removed the
border problem there was hardly any
traffic left anyway the Fen ban was
eventually shut down at the end of 2001
most of the evidence of the former
railway has gone now and the route has
been turned into a long distance path
for cyclists and hikers but here at Cal
to hairbag where the line rejoins the
rest of Belgium at the southern end
you'll find an old station and the start
of 7 kilometres of remaining track they
don't run trains from here anymore but
entertainingly you can instead pedal
your way down the line on a rail bike it
looks like a lot of fun and I was all
set to jump on one of them before being
politely advised that they're quite
heavy they're a lot of effort and really
they're designed for groups and families
if like me you're neither a group nor a
family you can at least console yourself
with a tremendous selection of waffles
from the buffet car or pop back over to
the German side of the road and get some
schnitzel from Biggie's after that my
stomach was almost as heavy as a rail
bike so I hopped on a bus back up the
line and if you look carefully out of
the window here you can just about not
quite see the single exclave house a
true clog which remains separated from
the rest of Germany because even though
the railways been gone for nearly 20
years now Belgium seems quite happy to
keep the land the bus dropped me back at
the same place where I started the video
the old station at Rokan where a
particularly squiggly section of the
border means that you can jog across two
whole countries in about 15 seconds
brings a whole new meaning to the phrase
cross country run
but whether you're here for the running
or the railway history the biking or the
rail biking or you just really like
collecting text messages from phone
networks welcoming you to their country
there's no place on earth quite like the
Fen bar
you