My province’s heraldic elements have from their very conception included this lion rampant gules — if you can understand what the last two words mean I’d be rather impressed — and it’s also my cutie mark. No surprises there! But how that creature morphed into an uncanny circuit diagram… sorry, I meant rail network. Yes, that’s a much longer story.

I have a rather playful character, preferring to buck bolts out of thunderclouds rather than pushing them to Wallonia. My steadfast parents viewed this with much disdain, even tying my axillaries (aka wing joints) down for two days to pressure me into manipulating clouds with care and reason. My impulses diminished for a while afterwards, during which I often relaxed on cirrus clouds mulling over whatever was happening on earth.

That was when everything inside me shattered: instead of rolling hills punctuated only by the occasional stone I was confronted with twisting dark grey filaments on which even darker rectangles travelled, all resting on a desaturated beige background. Limburg sits between Amsterdam, Brussels and the Ruhr, all exploding metropolitan areas at that time, hence the freight carriers tunnelling between these three cities and in particular this region. Heartbroken at the loss of so much nature, yet optimistic that some rail activity could co-exist with the older Limburgers’ lifestyles, my fluttering wings carried me across the entire province from my birthplace Venlo to where Gelderland borders and back, looking for the “perfect” routes trains should follow to minimise ecological damage; the resulting planned network I nailed on the walls of several popular buildings in Maastricht — guerrilla marketing, eh? Anyway ponies did notice the scheme and drove it to the faint-of-heart rail operators, who proceeded to uproot the spaghetti-like old network and lay down the suggested new spoorwegen. As I’d drawn my network in the same style immortalised by The Tube Map, the Limburgian lion cutie mark I received after reading a newspaper article about the change is therefore a mesh of railway lines and terminal circles.