Delays, cancellations, overcrowded trains and expensive tickets that do not go down in price, but go up: the Dutch Railways are receiving considerable criticism. With our own staff and with travelers. “We really think things are going terribly bad.”
There will be few places in the Netherlands where there has been so much cursing and grumbling in recent months as on the country’s railways. Again today, at 08.13 am at Utrecht Central Station. The trains are too short, too late and overcrowded, so that halfway through the morning rush hour the train toilets smell as if all travelers ate asparagus yesterday. Everywhere people are coughing in each other’s faces prepandemic and because everyone knows that the conductors won’t show themselves because of the crowds, the first class is also packed.
Nobody talks to each other, except in the quiet compartment. A woman munches away a bowl of low-fat cottage cheese, which everyone tries to ignore, but no one succeeds. And in the aisle is a woman who looks at the man in front of her, especially his armpit, which is close to her face, in disgust.
‘Well,’ says Jaap van der Heijden (36) with an almost apologetic smile on his face as he also looks into the compartment. Van der Heijden is not only a fanatic commuter who has spent about 80 minutes a day in intercity trains for years – on good days at least, on bad days he goes well over 100 minutes – namely a great train enthusiast. This summer he traveled all over Europe by train with a group of friends. First to Istanbul, then on to Scandinavia – ‘great’, he says.
In the Netherlands he always enjoyed the train, because it is a sustainable alternative, you can wake up quietly and between Utrecht, where he lives, and The Hague, where he works, you have enough time to browse through the newspaper or to send some emails. But that was then. Because not long after the corona crisis broke out, things went from bad to worse, to much worse, until October 2022.
‘In all my years on the train, I’ve never experienced it so bad,’ he says in the intercity to The Hague Central, which arrived five minutes late. Today that was not such a disaster, because the bus to the station was also canceled due to staff shortages.
What is annoying, however, is that the train is packed and he now has to stand with nine others in the ‘balcony’, the hall near the train doors. That’s why opening his laptop is not possible today, let alone that he can wake up peacefully.
‘The biggest problem is that there is not really a perspective,’ says Van der Heijden, who visits a special website every morning that indicates exactly how many trainsets each train has, in an often futile attempt to get a seat. ‘They say it’s because of the staff shortage, but that will only get worse in the coming years due to the aging population. What does that mean for the future? I sometimes speak to a conductor about this, or I tweet the NS, but they only come up with stories about ‘logistical challenges’ or ‘company-sensitive information’.’
The passenger organizations that are united in the National Consultation on Consumers’ Interests in Public Transport (Locov) also say that things are currently going dramatically on the Dutch track. In a twenty-page letter to the NS management, which they will publish on Wednesday, they wipe the floor with the way in which the company is dealing with the current crisis. They fear that the service is in danger of dropping to an ‘unacceptable level’, mainly due to the cancellation of a continuously growing number of trains. As consumer organizations it is their legal right to give advice on, for example, the new timetable of the NS, and their opinion this year is negative on almost all points.
‘We really think it is going terribly bad,’ says Freek Bos, director of the Rover traveler’s association. Compared to the pre-corona year 2019, NS plans to cancel 13 percent of all trains next year and even scale down 15 to 20 percent at the weekend. On some routes and times of the week, the number of journeys will soon be halved. That while train tickets, which are already historically expensive, will increase in price by 3 percent from next year.
It is not without reason that the number of complaints received by Rover was 60 percent higher last month than in September 2019, while compared to that pre-corona year, 20 percent fewer travelers still use the train.
‘The scaling down is gigantic’, says Bos van Rover. ‘And that 13 percent is only about preventive, planned scaling down. Also on the day itself there are often many canceled trains. We recently saw on a Friday that according to the NS there were no planned adjustments, while during the day outside we saw that fewer trains were running on nine routes.’
Moreover, not all choices that NS currently makes to solve the problems in the long term are easy to understand, say the passenger organizations. In their advice to the NS, in which the finger is pointed at the sore spot on dozens of different routes, they ask questions about the enigmatic use of trains that are too short. Trains with seven ‘barges’, as coupés are called in technical jargon, are often disconnected at the end of rush hour so that they only run with three ‘barges’ during off-peak hours. The other four barges are then taken to a shunting yard, only to be used again in the evening.
According to the NS, this happens because fewer conductors are then needed to man the trains during off-peak hours – according to its own company standards there must be a certain number of conductors per number of boxes – but the passenger organizations write that the ‘connection and disconnection of trains’ extremely expensive in extra services for drivers’. ‘In recent months, we have regularly seen that trains also ran in the shortest possible composition on routes that had been scaled down, while these could have been doubled in length with the same deployment standards of personnel. This resulted in full trains even in the late evening hours, while this was unnecessary.’ According to the NS, however, the staff shortage is mainly affecting the number of conductors, not so much the drivers.
For example, the passenger organizations have many more questions, such as whether proper consultations have been made with local bus and tram carriers in order to avoid extra transfer time in the future. Why aren’t office workers deployed to deal with the crisis? And is it smart to cancel trains especially during off-peak hours, because the pressure on rush hour will only increase and this will therefore drive more and more people towards their cars, onto the highway?
But the most important question is: what are the plans for the longer term? Now, with every gust of headwind, a standard three-stage rocket follows from the NS head office, namely: pointing to the staff shortage, using fewer trains and asking for understanding. But ‘you do not indicate how long this will take’, write the traveler organizations. ‘In our view, you should offer the timetable in full according to the original plans as soon as the staff shortage has been resolved. We lack a scaling-up plan in this regard.’
In its response, the NS refers mainly to the staff shortage. “We have to conclude that unfortunately we have all been taken by surprise in the Netherlands by a labor market that is too tight,” says a spokesperson. ‘Of course we would have preferred to run with the original timetable, or else with longer trains, but longer trains require more conductors. And we also have a responsibility to our colleagues. We want to prevent the workload from increasing even further, because if the workload increases, absenteeism will increase, you will become a less attractive employer and you will end up in a vicious circle, which will only increase the staff shortage.’
That resentment about the current situation on the railways is not only among the passengers, but indeed also among the NS staff themselves, as was apparent from last August’s four-day ‘strike relay’, which brought train traffic to a standstill in virtually the entire country. NS CEO Bert Groenewegen had to call for ‘understanding and self-reliance’ among passengers.
‘I’m getting so tired of this’, sighs a woman who tried to work on her laptop during the first part of the journey to The Hague Central, but now gives up those attempts and decides to follow the story of commuter Van der Heijden. The nine other passengers, who are glued to each other on the balcony, sometimes nod their heads in agreement, raise eyebrows or puff with exalted displeasure.
The atmosphere in their intercity has become nasty and stuffy anyway. In the compartments themselves, too, there are travelers all over the aisle who seem to conclude on their social media apps as early as Monday morning that the lives of all their friends are far more exciting than their own, causing their minds to sink a little lower with every thumbs-up. .
Just click away to a news app: war in Ukraine, angry farmers, chaos at Schiphol, increased gas tariffs. A cursory glance out the window: Gouda-Goverwelle station. The weather app: ‘Tomorrow 40 percent chance of rain.’ NS app for the return journey then: ‘This travel advice has expired.’
Again, commuter Van der Heijden smiles his almost apologetic smile. “Well,” he says again.