Aachen Hauptbahnhof is the most important railway station for the city of Aachen, in the far west of Germany near the Dutch and Belgian border. It is the largest of the four currently active Aachen stations, and is integrated into the long-distance network.

The Cologne–Aachen high-speed line is the German part of the Trans-European transport networks project high-speed line Paris–Brussels–Cologne. It is not a newly built railway line, but a project to upgrade the existing railway line which was opened in 1841 by the Rhenish Railway Company. When it was continued into Belgium in 1843, it became the world's first international railway line.