“Dear travelers”, Kim Verhees from Hoeven imitates. Her voice cannot be distinguished from a real NS call. She discovered her talent a while back and now the Hoevense is doing well for the title of best train announcer of 2023.
Talent or that speech therapy study? Anyway, she can mimic a station announcer’s voice perfectly. It’s probably a bit of both, “but I learned it at school,” Verhees admits. “There I often had to speak with this accent, a bit of general Dutch.” And that happens to sound exactly the same as the announcers of the Dutch Railways pronounce it.
The resemblance only really starts to stand out when the speech therapist is in a friend’s car to navigate. “I did that for fun with that voice,” she says. With flapping ears, the driver hears the instructions: “Wow, that sounds exactly the same.”
“I hate to hear myself reflected like that.”
To crown this unexpected talent, Verhees is now participating in the competition for Best Train Announcer 2023, in which she competes against three other broadcast vocalists. She even gave a funny story in an intercity train to entertain the travelers and put her broadcasting skills to the test. “That conductor was a really nice guy, we had a good time talking”, she looks back. “But I think it’s terrible to hear myself back like that.”
A career switch is a bit much for the Hoevense, but she really likes the participation. From Tuesday 20 June to 28 June you can go to the Brabant nightingale be voted onto rename her national number one.
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