The National Railway Company of Belgium (, NMBS;, SNCB; ) is the national railway company of Belgium. The company formally styles itself using the Dutch and French abbreviations NMBS/SNCB. The corporate logo designed in 1936 by Henry van de Velde consists of the linguistically neutral letter B in a horizontal oval.
History
NMBS/SNCB is an autonomous government company, formed in 1926 as successor to the Belgian State Railways. From 1942 to 1944, amid Nazi Germany's occupation of Belgium, the company was paid 51 million Belgian francs by the Nazi Germany to send 28 trains carrying 25,843 Jews and Roma people to Auschwitz where only 1,195 survived.[2] The company also sent 16,000 political prisoners to concentration camps.[2]
In 2005, the company was split up into three parts: Infrabel, which manages the railway infrastructure, network operations, and network access, the public railway operator NMBS/SNCB itself to manage the freight (B-Cargo) and passenger services, and NMBS/SNCB-Holding, which owns both public companies and supervises the collaboration between them. Essentially, this was a move to facilitate future liberalisation of railway freight and passenger services in agreement with European regulations. Several freight operators have since received access permissions for the Belgian network.