The company was founded on 12 February 1900 as
Reinickendorf-Liebenwalde-Groß Schönebecker Eisenbahn AG to build and operate a local railway line linking
Berlin-Wilhelmsruh (known then as Reinickendorf station) with
Liebenwalde and
Groß Schönebeck via a junction at
Basdorf. Said railway opened on 21 May 1901. On 8 January 1927, the company received its current name,
Niederbarnimer Eisenbahn-Aktiengesellschaft. Becoming a popular excursion line for Berliners, the nickname
Heidekrautbahn (“the heather train”) was coined in the 1920s. After the
Second World War, NEB found itself running from
Soviet-occupied Brandenburg into
West Berlin. As part of the
socialist reforms of
East Germany, all private railways in the country were seized and nationalised into the
Deutsche Reichsbahn. Uniquely, as it also held assets in West Berlin, NEB kept being a legal entity and only conferred the "management and right of use" of all its assets to Deutsche Reichsbahn by contract in 1950. This contract contained a clause about a renegotiation in the case of the reunification of Berlin. In 2004, NEB won the tender by
Verkehrsverbund Berlin-Brandenburg (VBB) to run the RB27 train service from Berlin-Karow to Schmachtenhagen and Groß Schönebeck over its historic network from December 2005 to December 2020. To comply with
EU regulations, the train operations have been delegated to a separate legal entity, subsidiary
NEB Betriebsgesellschaft mbH, which was founded on 17 December 2004. On 11 December 2005, NEB started running passenger trains again after 55 years. In December 2006, NEB also started running passenger trains on the RB26 route between Berlin and
Kostrzyn in
Poland, a tender it had won in 2005. == Current operations ==