Van der Gaag Lane

Van der Gaag Lane was a short privately-owned road south of Delft in the Netherlands, notable for being the subject of a frog war between property developer A.H.J. van Wickevoort Crommelin and the operator of the Netherlands' first railway, Hollandsche IJzeren Spoorweg-Maatschappij. The lane was purchased from the innkeeper J. van der Gaag in 1845 to serve as a holdout property, whose sole purpose was to block the construction of the Rotterdam-Hague railway in retaliation for the rail operator's refusal to add to the earlier Haarlem-Leiden line a train station that would serve Zandvoort, a town which van Wickevoort Crommelin was intent on promoting as a seaside resort. After a drawn-out expropriation process that took almost two years and failed to acquire the land, the railway company finally completed the line with a sharp bend around Crommelin's road, which served for only five days before the landowner caved to legal pressure and gave the land to the railway company for free.

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