Kim Verhees succeeded. De Hoevense can call itself the best train announcer of 2023. Verhees received by far the most votes in the competition held by the Dutch Railways last week. What will it mean for her? “I feel honored. We’ll see.” She wins at least a trip to Paris for two people.
According to the Dutch Railways, she has stimulated travelers to make the world a little happier with her clear and transparent broadcasting. The videos of the four candidates were viewed a total of 45,000 times. 1,800 viewers cast their vote via YouTube. Kim received 49 percent of the vote.
“From the start I got the most votes. That is of course very nice. But the most important thing is that the profession of conductor and my profession, speech therapist, have received positive attention. That was what the NS and I were all about,” says Kim.
“I hate to hear myself reflected like that.”
She was first noticed when Beau named her video on TikTok in his TV program of the same name on RTL. The speech therapist has not started bouncing from all the attention. She is relaxed about it, just as she boarded the train without any pretensions and made her debut on YouTube as a train announcer. On arrival in Amsterdam, she routinely addressed all travelers.
It is no coincidence that Kim can perfectly imitate the voice of a station announcer. “I learned it at school,” says Verhees. “There I often had to speak with this accent, a bit of generally civilized Dutch. But I think it’s terrible to hear myself reflected like that.”
In addition to Kim, three other candidates were in the running for the title. All were given a ‘real’ conductor as a coach. With Kim that was Ruud Bekker. During a train journey, they had to prepare for a speech through the microphone and were thrown to the lions. The cheerful and personal way in which the Hoevense came across made an impression.
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