Belgian Train Museum Had a Hard Time Getting on Track

Belgium is home to the first railway in continental Europe, but its steam trains were largely lost to history. Now the old locomotives that helped build Europe's Industrial Revolution are getting their own museum. WSJ's Frances Robinson reports.

SCHAERBEEK, Belgium�This country built continental Europe's first railway line in 1835 and still boasts the world's densest rail network. Belgians ran the world's longest passenger train, which had 70 cars. This country the size of Maryland even has five vintage railways, run by enthusiasts.

What Belgium lacks is a national train museum. Officials couldn't agree on where to put it.

Now, 178 years after "Le Belge" puffed 15 miles from Brussels to Mechelen, the project has a green light. Work has started just outside Brussels on Train World, which is scheduled to open next year.

The center will be a "rail opera" of trains past, present and future, promises Fran�ois Schuiten, the museum designer and popular Belgian comic-book author.

Reaching this junction has been a bumpy ride. Just choosing a site entailed regional battles among train lovers from Dutch-speaking Flanders, French-speaking Wallonia and from the eventual winner, the polyglot Brussels region.

Now, before the museum can open, Belgium's SNCB state railway must tackle another, unexpected, problem: too many trains.

The reason for the surfeit is hotly debated. Enthusiast Baudouin Dieu, president of the PFT Rail and Tourism Heritage Association, tells a story of intrigue. It starts in 1966, when Belgium's last regular steam service ceased puffing. As convoys of condemned steam engines were taken off to the junkyard, enterprising SNCB employees flouted orders and furtively decoupled their favorite locomotives and hid them in remote sidings and dusty corners of rail sheds. "The real gems," says Mr. Dieu. "They stashed them away, without management knowing."

Mr. Schuiten's latest fiction book is inspired by�and dedicated to�the SNCB's romantic renegades. It recounts their hiding a Belgian steam icon, the Class 12, in a parallel world where steam and retro technology still rule, Belgium is flooding, and the train is being replaced with a monorail.

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The Classe 12 steam locomotive

Officials from the state train company reject stories like that.

"It's a bit of an urban legend," sniffs SNCB spokesman Erik Sclep. He says the company started planning its heritage collection seriously in the 1980s, and "only a very few" trains from the steam era were hidden away.

Onboard the so-called Valentrain, a special service run by the heritage association where couples enjoy pink Champagne in a dining car from the 1930s, engineer Alain Defechereux says he recalls several enthusiasts telling him of a particularly beloved, decommissioned train that was secretly preserved in the corner of a large depot.

"These guys are railway men, they work all their life with an engine," he said. "So when you send a piece to the scrapheap because it's 'not profitable,' that hits them here," he added, hand over heart.

The train-savers are respected, but they created a problem for Belgium's railway hobbyists. Even though their country was once a top locomotive manufacturer, exporting to such far-flung places as Congo, China and Chile, the enthusiasts couldn't get their hands on the country's vintage trains. So they turned to the former East Bloc, where locomotives could be had for ready cash.

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Le Belge

The fleet of Mr. Dieu's heritage association, for example, includes a 1968 Romanian steam locomotive. To make it Belgian, he says, "you just change the wheels and repaint it."

Flemish enthusiasts at Steam Center Maldegem, a heritage center in northern Belgium, recently spent a cold day cutting spare boiler screws for their stable, which includes a Polish-built steam engine, the "General Maczek," named for the Polish general who helped liberate Belgium in World War II. General Maczek again achieved victory, two years ago, when Steam Center director Jason Van Landschoot sped past a locomotive of Wallonia's Three Valleys Railway in a race.

Even the one steam locomotive in the SNCB's own official heritage collection�drably named 29.013�was built in Canada, as Belgium ordered engines from North America to replace the equipment destroyed in World War II. Now, the rediscovery of Belgium's hidden train treasures comes at an opportune moment because enthusiasts in the East are awakening to their own heritage, and supplies of their steam engines are drying up.

Train World curators, meanwhile, have been grappling with the vast number of pieces they have uncovered: 208 locomotives, passenger and freight cars. Lined up, all this treasure would stretch nearly 2 miles.

To divvy up the giant train set, SNCB managers in January 2011 organized a secret meeting with directors of Belgium's rail heritage associations.

"We all know each other's collections," says Mr. Van Landschoot.

The event was like a sports-league draft but friendly, recalls Mr. Dieu. "We did some horse trading�I'll take that if you take this."

Under an agreement reached at the meeting, each association is taking possession of mothballed Belgian rail stock to restore and use. The condition is they must be willing to lend the pieces back to Train World for special exhibitions on request.

As the railroad lovers rebuild their trains, work on Train World is building up a head of steam.

"It won't be a museum. We're going to recapture the fascination of the train," said Mr. Schuiten, the artist, as he toured the site one day recently.

Visitors will enter the domed Art Nouveau ticket hall of Schaerbeek station, built in 1913�and previously the departure point for night trains to Italy and France. There, "a cloud of LED [lights] will play with people's perception," Mr. Schuiten said. Computerized images will bring the history of Belgium's railways to life. Behind the high-tech curtain will be the low-tech trains including Mr. Schuiten's beloved Class 12.

Overhead, a giant walkway will take visitors over the signalman's cottage, revealing a vast model railway inside.

Mr. Sclep, the SNCB spokesman, says that finding the site and managing the vast collection posed "a typically Belgian problem." Giving each part of the country its own piece of rail history and shuttling trains around, he said, as he stood amid the muddy potholes of Schaerbeek station, offered "a typically Belgian solution."

Write to Frances Robinson at frances.robinson@dowjones.com