European route E314

The European route E 314 is a road in Europe and a part of the United Nations International E-road network. Approximately 125 kilometers (78 mi) long, it connects the Belgian university city of Leuven with Aachen, Charlemagne's capital during the early ninth century, and today a bustling commercial centre in Germany's North Rhine-Westphalia.

Three Nations

For most of its length the E 314 is in Belgium where it tracks the A2. It then crosses briefly into Dutch Limburg, the most southerly province of The Netherlands before an even briefer stretch between the Dutch-German frontier and Aachen: the German section tracks the start of the Autobahn A 4, which continues beyond Aachen all the way to Görlitz.

In Belgium the road is of standard autoroute quality with two lanes in each direction. The Dutch section includes a short six lane section but also the only part of the E 314 of sub-autoroute quality, though even here the road uses a dual carriageway lay-out.

Highlights of the route

Between the end points, the road also serves Hasselt, the capital of Limburg and the industrial city of Genk where Ford build their Mondeo model.   The Belgian section continues through the Hoge Kempen National Park:  in 2005 the Kikbeek Ecoduct was opened here, whereby the road runs through a short tunnel section above which wild life has space to cross the road in relative safety. 

The Dutch section is noteworthy for the sight of a large chemical plant shortly after crossing the frontier from Belgium. In the Netherlands, near to Heerlen, the E 414 also crosses the Dutch A2 Highway, a major artery of the Dutch roadway network, connecting nearby Maastricht with the heart of the country and Amsterdam.

Language changes

The area covered by this road has historically been at the frontier between two or three different linguistic regions. The language frontiers have shifted backwards and forwards over the centuries. Place names on the E 314 will be known to English speakers by different names according to when the 'English' language name was adopted into the English language. Most famously, at the eastern end of the road Aachen is still known to some English speakers (and in their nineteenth century literature) by its French name as Aix or Aix-la-Chapelle, while road signs in Limburg will use the Flemish spelling, Aken.

At the western end of the road Leuven is located firmly in the Flemish speaking part of Belgium, but the city and its university still respect (and for some purposes accord equal status to) the French version of the name, Louvain: this recalls many centuries during which French was the hallmark language of ruling elites in many countries in western, central and southern Europe, while the German and Flemish languages were significantly more fragmented into their regional dialects than during the nationalistic twentieth century.

The route

Sources and further reading

This article incorporates information from the revision as of 2008-05-17 of the equivalent article on the Dutch Wikipedia.