Lineas Brand Guidelines: Belgium’s Former B Logistics, Renamed in 2017

A state railway’s freight arm becomes a company.

Lineas is the former freight business of the Belgian national railway company, NMBS/SNCB. English Wikipedia traces the change to the European Union’s Second Railway Package of 2005, after which Belgian rail was split into Infrabel, which runs the infrastructure, and NMBS/SNCB, which runs trains. Freight sat in a division called SNCB Logistics, and in 2011 it was set up as a separate company, still wholly owned by the railway group. The Belgian business site made-in.be, writing in December 2025, describes the company as having grown out of the former NMBS subsidiary B-Cargo.

The decisive step came in 2015. Wikipedia says the private equity firm Argos Wityu, together with the company’s management, bought a 69% stake, with NMBS/SNCB keeping 31%. The business then traded as B Logistics, and in early 2017 it changed its name to Lineas, while cutting back the links to NMBS/SNCB and Infrabel that remained. In 2019 Argos Wityu bought a further 21% from the railway company, and in 2021 the Belgian federal holding and investment company, SFPI/FPIM, took over the last 10%, ending the railway group’s involvement, according to Wikipedia. At privatisation the company took over 41 Class 13 electric locomotives, 110 Class 77 diesels and about 7,000 wagons.

Green Xpress, port rail and multi-system locomotives.

Lineas sells its services as a network. Its signature product is Green Xpress, a set of frequent wagonload trains on fixed routes and timetables, which Wikipedia says links Antwerp with hubs such as Cologne, Le Havre, Vienna and Bratislava, using multi-system locomotives and open-access rights to avoid shunting along the way. Railway Technology reported in May 2021 that the network had grown to 23 destinations, when Lineas bought the Dutch operator Independent Rail Partner, which provides first- and last-mile services around Rotterdam; the company said at the time that combining the two would bring new Xpress connections from Rotterdam and shorter transit times. Beyond Green Xpress, the company’s site lists block trains, single wagonload, first- and last-mile work, spot trains and intermodal trains, for steel, chemicals, coal, building materials and containers.

The ports are central. made-in.be called Lineas by far the largest user of the rail tracks in the ports of Antwerp and Zeebrugge, and in October 2026 the company said it had been awarded the operation of Railport Area 7 in the Port of Antwerp, after Areas 1 to 5 and 6B in 2025. In December 2025 it opened Modalink, a joint venture with FS Logistix at Antwerp’s Mainhub terminal, to develop intermodal links between Belgium and Italy.

The fleet has been changing too. In April 2024, Railway Gazette reported, Lineas unveiled a locomotive running on FAME, a biofuel made from non-food raw materials such as used cooking oil, tested with Cargill. In March 2026 it leased two Stadler EURO9000 multi-system locomotives from Alpha Trains, mainly for domestic traffic in Germany, Railway Supply reported, and in June 2026 it put EURO9000s to work on freight flows for Novelis from Göttingen. For its French operations, Wikipedia says, it leases a fleet of 39 Alstom Prima locomotives from Akiem, and in December 2025 the company extended for six years a lease of 33 electric locomotives from Railpool.

Technology and sustainability feature on its pages as dated projects. In 2020, Wikipedia says, Lineas, the Dutch infrastructure manager ProRail and Alstom demonstrated an autonomous shunting locomotive, and the company has set carbon reduction targets validated by the Science Based Targets initiative. Lineas is a member of Rail Freight Forward, a group of European rail freight companies that campaigns for moving freight from road to rail, and of the Belgian Rail Freight Forum. Its sustainability section is organised around four ESG pillars and an annual ESG report.

Rail freight and documentation.

Rail freight operators sell a service that most people only glimpse from a level crossing or a station platform, so their identities lean heavily on the one thing everyone does see: the locomotive. Liveries, fleet numbers and named engines carry the brand across a whole network, and operators publish photographs of their fleets on their websites, in press releases and on social channels. A repaint for a customer, a partner or an anniversary is usually announced as news in its own right.

The second visual constant is the map. Operators that sell regular routes tend to show them as network diagrams, with ports, terminals and inland hubs joined by lines, much like a passenger timetable. Those that run trains to order describe their work in service categories instead, such as intermodal container trains, block trains for bulk goods, single wagonload and first- and last-mile shunting, and the wording on those pages is the company’s own description of what it offers.

Fleet pages are a genre of their own. Many operators list their locomotive classes with build dates, power systems and the routes they work, and new orders are presented as milestones, often with the builder and the leasing company named alongside. Numbers on these pages, from staff and trainloads to tonnage and market share, are figures the companies give about themselves at a particular date, and they change from year to year.

Sustainability pages have become standard across the sector. They usually set out targets, partnerships and new traction such as electric, bi-mode or biofuel locomotives, each tied to a dated announcement. In the guides that follow, those pages are treated as statements of what each company says it is doing and when, alongside its ownership history and the names it has traded under.

Count on us.

Lineas is headquartered in Brussels and lists offices in Lille, Mainz, Zwijndrecht in the Netherlands and, for intermodal work, Novara in Italy. Wikipedia says it provides its own traction in Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, France and Germany, and that in 2020 it was Europe’s largest private rail freight operator, a description the company still uses in its own press releases. Its website puts the workforce at more than 1,500 colleagues and leads with the line “Count on us,” while its social channels carry the name “Your Freight Force.”

The finances have been under strain. Wikipedia notes a decline in steel, chemicals and automotive traffic in 2025 and a government loan that year. In December 2025, made-in.be reported that Lineas had chosen a confidential judicial reorganisation procedure, a Belgian route introduced in 2023 that lets a company negotiate privately with its creditors when its continuity is under threat, in order to refinance its debts. Through 2026 the company kept announcing new work, from the EURO9000 leases to the Antwerp Railport award, and appointed a new country manager for Germany in May 2026 with the aim of moving closer to the top five rail freight operators there by 2030.

For a design guide, Lineas shows how a former state freight division can rename itself and sell a timetable as a brand. Compare SNCF, the national railway of France, where Lineas runs its own trains, and DB Cargo, the freight arm of Deutsche Bahn in Germany, another of its markets. For this guide we use a corridor green, a deep forest and a lime with a grotesque sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Lineas’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.