Railways are often seen as important means of integration, economically, socially and culturally. Whereas most of the literature so far has focused on integration through railways within the borders of different nation-states, this paper aims to present the development of cross-border railway traffic in the nineteenth and twentieth century. The first part of the paper offers an overview of railway governance in Europe in general, illustrated with some Dutch and Belgium examples. In the last third of the paper we will discuss the development of transnational rail traffic to and from the Netherlands to determine whether there is any relationship between major changes in rail governance and changes in these flows of transnational rail traffic. In doing so, we test the hypothesis of Wayne Sandholtz and Alec Stone Sweet that the development of cross-border flows preceded the building up of formal integration. The starting point of our paper is the 1997 article of Alec Stone Sweet and Wayne Sandholtz entitled ‘European integration and supranational governance’.