Aachen Travel Information


About the city


A good introduction to Aachen can be found here. Other interesting links are


How to get to Aachen


General travel information can be found at the homepage of the Aachen Tourist Service. Here some details:

By train

There are very regular connections to all major cities in Germany, mostly via either Köln (Cologne) or Düsseldorf, Liège and Bruxelles in Belgium, Paris, France, as well as Heerlen, the Netherlands. You should leave your train at Aachen HBF (HauptBahnHof). Some hotels can be reached on foot, for others it is best to take a taxi; the fee will lie in the range DM 10 to DM 20. For information on train schedules, have a look at the homepage of the German Railway (Deutsche Bahn).

By plain

You can fly into Düsseldorf or Bruxelles airport from which there are regular train connections to Aachen (taking about 2 to 2.5 hours, mostly with only a single change). Alternatively, you could fly into Frankfurt and take the train (via Cologne) to Aachen, taking about 3 to 4 hours. Train tickets can be bought at the railway stations. You can often reserve seats, but most often this is not really necessary, unless you plan to travel in the usual rush hours in the morning. The airports in Bruxelles, Düsseldorf and Frankfurt all have their own train stations; no shuttle busses or taxi rides are required. Of course, hiring cars at all these airports is possible and driving from them to Aachen takes about as long as taking the train. Depending on the hotel you will be in, parking might be a problem in Aachen, and certainly is at the workshop venue.

Alternatively you can also fly into Amsterdam Airport (Schiphol) and take the train to Heerlen (almost 3 hours) and from there take a local train to Aachen to cross the border (30 minutes). Dutch train schedules can be found here. There is a possibility to have a connecting flight from Schiphol to Maastricht-Aachen-Airport, a small regional airport close to Maastricht and Aachen. From there, you can take a bus to Maastricht and then take the train to Heerlen and continue to Aachen as above. There is also a direct bus from Maastricht to Aachen. Actually, you might like to visit Maastricht anyway; it's the oldest city in the Netherlands and has some nice roman remains as well as very good pubs and restaurants.