Vemb to Thyborøn: the Lemvigbanen

Lemvig has spent a century and a half at the back of the queue. When the West Jutland main line was being planned in the 1870s, the town asked for it to be carried on from Ringkøbing through Lemvig and up to Struer. The answer was no: in 1874 the rails went inland instead, from Ringkøbing by way of Vemb to Holstebro, and Lemvig was left eleven kilometres off the network with a fjord in the way.

So the town built its own. A company was formed, the money was found locally, and on 20 July 1879 the Vemb–Lemvig Jernbane began running three trains a day in each direction. It was built as cheaply as a railway can be built. The rails weighed 17.4 kilograms per metre, laid on untreated sleepers. There was no fencing, no guarding at the level crossings and no signals at all — the first Danish railway to open in that condition. The whole stock was three small tank engines, one of them second-hand, six compartment carriages and seven goods wagons, and that was the railway.

The pattern held for the next hundred years. When Denmark's private railways were re-equipped with railbuses in 1948, this one was passed over, and bought other companies' worn-out ones in the 1960s. When the private railways got the Y-tog in the 1960s, it was passed over again, and made do with four second-hand Swedish railbuses from 1973. Its first factory-new trains did not arrive until 1983. By 2020 it was the last railway in Denmark still working its traffic with Y-tog, the boxy red-and-orange railcars everyone else had retired.

And then, in 2025, the line that had never been first at anything became the first at the thing that matters now. The Y-tog went, and Denmark's first battery trains took over the 57 kilometres between Vemb, Lemvig and Thyborøn — running silently across a landscape of wind turbines and sea dikes, charging from an overhead wire that is only a few hundred metres long. A railway assembled out of other people's cast-offs for 146 years had leapfrogged the entire country.

The train leaves from platform 1 at Vemb, alongside the main-line trains to Holstebro and Skjern — though for the railway's first eighty years it did not. Until 1959 the Lemvig company kept its own separate station immediately west of the state one, which is the sort of arrangement that follows from being told no in 1874.

From Vemb the line turns north-west across farmland, and seven halts go by in less than half an hour: Amstrup, Bækmarksbro, Sinkbæk, Fåre, Ramme, Bonnet and Armose. Most of these are trinbrætter — bare halts, a platform and a nameboard. At every one of them, and at every station on the line except Thyborøn Havn, Lemvig and Vemb, the timetable carries the same instruction: the platform signal has to be switched on, and passengers should be visible on the platform when the train comes into sight. Armose is the summit of the whole railway, at 45 metres above the sea.

Lemvig, where the wire is

Lemvig is the hinge of the line and its headquarters, and the train stands here for a quarter of an hour on the through working. The station sits up on the plateau rather than down in the town, because in 1879 taking the line the last stretch down to the harbour would have cost 80,000 kroner more than the company had. Above the platform is the reason the stop is long: a short island of overhead wire at 25,000 volts, one of three on the two lines Midtjyske Jernbaner runs, where the battery train draws its charge. Four to eight minutes is enough — about as long as it takes passengers to get on and off.

The trains are Siemens Mireo Plus B units, Denmark's first battery-electric passenger stock, running on lithium-titanate cells with a range of 80 to 120 kilometres. They weigh 93 tonnes, hold 282 people, and replaced diesels that had been putting out something like 1,900 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year. The livery deliberately keeps the old Y-tog's colours, and each unit carries illustrations of ten landmarks from the districts the railway passes through, chosen with local people: the wind turbines, Lemvig church with its onion dome, Bovbjerg lighthouse, a fishing cutter, the gate tower of Nørre Vosborg near Vemb.

Down to the harbour, and why you cannot follow

Below Lemvig station the ground falls more than thirty metres to the water, and in 1892 the company built a goods branch down it — 1.8 kilometres of track that zig-zags, the train reversing halfway at a single-tongued point because no other alignment would fit. Its bridge over Vesterbjerg, put up the same year, is still an emblem of the town; the old VLTJ arms are on the arch. The branch never had scheduled passengers, but preserved trains worked it on and off from 1991 under the name Bjergbanen, the mountain railway. That has stopped. The society's own timetable page says the line must be renovated before it can carry passengers again, so the descent is one to look at rather than ride.

The tange

North of Lemvig the character changes completely. Balleby, Klinkby, Nejrup and Strande come and go, then Victoria Street Station — a halt whose sign went missing in the 1920s, after which residents put up one of their own devising, and the invented English name became official in May 1991.

From Vrist the railway is out on the Harboøre Tange, a sand spit between the North Sea and Nissum Bredning that has been overtopped and breached repeatedly since 1550. The original alignment ran along the low beach meadow and flooded; the track was lifted a metre onto an embankment in the summer of 1921, and in 1955 the whole northern section was moved about two kilometres east to run beside the road on the new sea dike. Two stops were lost in the move and one gained — Rønland, which exists to serve the chemical works. On a clear day the sea is on one side and the fjord on the other, with turbines turning on both horizons.

Thyborøn Kirke, then Thyborøn Havn, and the line stops among the fishing boats it was built for.

Midtjyske Jernbaner brought in a new timetable on 27 June 2026, built around the battery trains and around Vemb as an interchange, so that arrivals there connect on to Holstebro, Skjern and Lemvig without a long wait. The figures below are from the operator's own printed timetable for line 93, valid from that date, checked against live journey data in August 2026.

Weekdays

Seven trains a day leave Vemb for the Lemvig direction: 07:10, 09:05, 10:55, 12:55, 14:55, 16:55 and 19:55. Two of those — the 07:10 and the 09:05 — run straight through to Thyborøn Havn without a change, taking 1 hour 20 minutes and 1 hour 17 minutes respectively for the full 57 kilometres. The rest terminate at Lemvig.

From Lemvig to Thyborøn there are eight departures: 06:10, 08:00, 09:52, 12:40, 14:00, 15:40, 17:40 and 20:40, about 30 minutes for the 23 kilometres. From Lemvig back to Vemb: 03:54, 06:07, 09:39, 12:10, 14:00, 15:30 and 19:10, around 34 minutes.

Coming the other way, every departure from Thyborøn Havn ends its run at Lemvig, so the journey out to the main line involves a change there. Weekday departures are 07:05, 08:40, 10:32, 13:20, 14:43, 16:20, 18:20 and 21:20. A worked example: the 13:20 reaches Lemvig at 13:50, and the 14:00 gets into Vemb at 14:34 — 1 hour 14 minutes end to end.

Weekends

Saturdays and Sundays run to a thinner pattern, nine departures from Lemvig on each. Thyborøn Havn has four trains on a Sunday: 09:05, 12:25, 15:25 and 19:10.

The June 2026 timetable added something the line has not had before: a direct train from Lemvig to Holstebro at 06:00 on Saturday and Sunday mornings, with no change at Vemb. The operator's own worked example is that leaving Lemvig at 06:00 on a Saturday puts you into Copenhagen Central at 12:00 with a single change, and that the 16:02 out of Copenhagen on a Sunday gets back to Lemvig at 21:26. Later evening departures from Lemvig and Thyborøn were added in the same revision.

Stopping the train

At every station except Thyborøn Havn, Lemvig and Vemb, the train calls only if asked. The platform signal has to be switched on, and the timetable adds a second instruction that matters on an unlit halt in winter — that passengers should be visible on the platform once the train is in sight.

Timetables and any planned changes are published at mjba.dk (opens in a new tab), and the line appears on Rejseplanen as line 93.

The Lemvigbanen is an ordinary part of the West Jutland public transport network, priced by Midttrafik on the same zone system as the region's buses, and the operator prints the zone number against every station in its timetable. End to end, Vemb to Thyborøn is six zones: 66.00 kr for an adult single, or 63.00 kr on Rejsekort. An adult may take two children under 12 free, and for a day out there is a family ticket at 109.00 kr covering two adults and four children.

Two quirks are worth knowing. Six departures on school days carry everybody free — no ticket, no check-in, no clip. And there are no ticket machines anywhere on the line, so the ticket or the Rejsekort check-in has to be sorted out before boarding rather than on the train. Bicycles and prams travel free, but reckon on lifting your own.

This is one of the few journeys in Denmark where the honest answer about a rail pass is no.

Interrail and Eurail publish a table of the railway companies their passes cover, country by country, with a column for excluded trains. On the edition last updated 9 July 2026, Denmark's excluded column contains exactly one entry, and it is Midtjyske Jernbaner — the company that runs the Lemvigbanen. Everything else in the Danish list is included: DSB's S-tog, InterCity and InterCity Lyn, Lokaltog, GoCollective, Nordjyske Jernbaner, Öresundståg and Nordjyllands Trafikselskab, all on Regional (RE) terms.

So a pass does not carry you between Vemb, Lemvig and Thyborøn, and the same exclusion applies to Midtjyske Jernbaner's other line, Holstebro–Skjern.

What the pass does do

It gets you to the junction. The trains that bring you to Vemb — and to Holstebro and Skjern at the far ends of the operator's other route — are run by DSB and GoCollective and are covered in full. From Vemb the missing piece is a six-zone Midttrafik single at 66.00 kr, or 46.00 kr if Lemvig is as far as you are going. Reservations are not required on Danish domestic trains, and none is possible on this line.

That is a small enough sum that it does not change how anyone plans a trip, and it is worth knowing in advance mainly so that a pass holder does not board assuming the pass covers it. Ticket inspection here ends in a penalty fare, and there is no machine on any platform to put things right after the fact.

The cheaper answers

Two of them are better than a pass on this line in any case. The family ticket at 109.00 kr covers two adults and four children for a whole day, which beats six-zone singles before the second journey. And six departures a day on school days are free to everyone, listed on the operator's site and set out under Tickets above — a Danish railway giving away seats is not something a pass can improve on.

Pass conditions were checked against Interrail's own railway-companies table in August 2026.

This is a coast that has been counting its drowned for four hundred years, and most of what there is to see along the line says so in one way or another — an anchor outside a churchyard, a memorial park in the dunes, a lighthouse put up after too many ships had come ashore in the dark.

The stops are close enough together that a day ticket and a bicycle cover a great deal of it. The operator's own family ticket is built for exactly this, and bicycles ride free. Thyborøn's museums are within a few minutes' walk of the two stations in the town; Harboøre church is a short walk from Harboøre station; Bovbjerg Fyr is the one that needs planning, about ten kilometres from Lemvig by bus or bike.

There is not a great deal of hotel accommodation along the Lemvigbanen, and what there is sits at the northern end, where the summer visitors go. Both of the places below are a few minutes from a station, and both are ordinary working hotels rather than resorts — this is a coast of fishing harbours, holiday cottages and campsites, and the pattern of somewhere to stay reflects that.

Lemvig itself, the largest town on the line, is better supplied with self-catering and guest-house accommodation than with hotels. Thyborøn's tourist office lists a campsite, a Danhostel, holiday apartments and larger summer houses alongside the hotel below.