and thus also outside the town boundary in the present-day Place Rogier, and the Gare du Midi inside the boulevard ring in what is today Place Rouppe. The Gare du Nord was the terminus for the lines from Holland, Germany, Antwerp and Liège, and the Gare du Midi for those from France, the south of Belgium and the Atlantic coast.
The two stations generated a good deal of traffic to and from the centre of the town and between their own two locations. But the north-south links which had to carry this traffic were totally inadequate. A first attempt at tackling the problem was the construction of the Rue du Midi, which was taken northwards from the south station in two stages. The Gare du Nord was reached by the seventeenthcentury Rue Neuve, which had been slightly re-routed at its northernmost end. But the capacity of this chain of streets was poor, particularly in the very narrow central link, the Rue des Fripiers, where the church of St Nicolas still sticks out into the street. The situation was further complicated by preparations during the 1860s for relocating the Gare du Midi to a site outside the boulevard ring;12 this would have made the communications between the two stations even worse. Various more or less realistic proposals were put forward for linking the Gare du Nord and the Gare du Midi, for example by running a double track along a broad street through the town.13
It was largely to the credit of one man that the many suggestions were finally transformed into a feasible project, and that the project itself could be realized. This man was Jules Anspach, a lawyer and politician who became mayor in 1863 at the age of only 34.