the last years of rail operations. Decline As early as 1966, rumours went around about a possible closure of the Heinsberg Railway. Deutsche Bundesbahn (DB) wanted to remove itself from loss-making operations on small secondary lines. Thus, the closure of the Heinsberg railway was discussed by DB. With the spread of motoring, passenger volume declined further in the 1970s. Public passenger traffic shifted away from the railway stations on the outskirts to buses operated by Deutsche Bundesbahn through the local centres and, at the same time, DB reduced services on the Heinsberg railway to only very few train pairs per day. In 1972, a ZDF broadcast called Länderspiegel compared the rather rural terminal station in Heinsberg with the main line Erkelenz station, in order to characterise the future district town of Heinsberg as a "peasant village" and to present the town of Erkelenz as a more suitable place for the administration of then newly formed Heinsberg district. Critics (local politicians and newspapers) saw the reduced supply as a cause of the drop in passenger numbers and claimed that the railway had systematically tried to make services on the route unattractive in order to use the resulting loss of passengers to build a case to close it. A further basis for this protest were the required passenger censuses of the local DB administration, which followed the usual DB practice in the 1970s and 1980s of being carried out during holidays, on days between weekends and public holidays (Brückentagen) or on weekends. A local CDU member of the Bundestag, Adolf Freiherr Spies von Büllesheim was doubtful about these surveys. He described the DB numbers as "unrealistic phantom numbers" which were "not verifiable". Despite this protest, the last scheduled passenger train ran on the line on 26 September 1980. While most of the stations on the line were demolished or used for other purposes, the Heinsberg station remained in operation (for the time being) as a service point for the freight traffic of the municipal gas works in Heinsberg. In the mid-1980s, however, the entrance building was demolished for the construction of the City Center. The shift of traffic from rail to road also took place in freight transport: with the transfer of small freight loads to the road through the new freight forwarding company, Bahntrans (a joint venture of DB and Thyssen Haniel Logistik), the transport of freight by rail was significantly