Köln-Mindener Eisenbahn-Gesellschaft
At the end of the 1860s the Cologne-Minden Railway Company built its largest project, when Prussia decided that the section of a French railway company's project for a line from Paris to Hamburg (called the "Paris-Hamburg line") in Germany would need to be owned and operated by a German railway company. The Cologne-Minden Railway Company won the tender to build the approximately 550 kilometre long Hamburg-Venlo line against the competition of the Rhenish Railway Company. The cost of its construction was calculated to be 43 million thalers.