Belgium Trains

Liège-Guillemins railway station, designed by Santiago Calatrava and opened in 2009 on the Place des Guillemins in Liège, Belgium, anchors this set with its sweeping steel, glass, and concrete canopy spanning five platforms and ten tracks. At the other end of the spectrum, an abandoned SNCB Autorail Série 400, unit 4001, sits on a disused line near Charleroi, a diesel multiple unit built by La Brugeoise et Nivelles in the early 1950s as part of post-war regional rail modernisation. The work moves between the polished and the derelict, from Brussels-South/Midi Station in September 2017, where Thalys and Eurostar services connect beneath the shadow of the adjacent Pullman Hotel and a glass skyscraper, to a weathered locomotive abandoned in a former industrial yard somewhere in the Belgian countryside. The Autorail 4001 and the unnamed locomotive represent the generation of rolling stock that preceded Belgium's shift toward high-speed international rail, while Liège-Guillemins and Brussels-Midi stand as the infrastructure that replaced it. Photographed across three days in late September 2017, the set ranges from Liège in the east to Charleroi in the south and Brussels in the centre, tracing the Belgian rail network through its grandest contemporary architecture and its forgotten remnants alike.