The standing House of Representatives committee, rail manager ProRail, the northern provinces; They are all convinced that a solution must be found for the bottleneck on the railway between Meppel and Zwolle. Now the cabinet. Accidents and disruptions mean that a total of 9 hours a week no trains run or they are delayed.
The standing House of Representatives committee came to Meppel station today to see how far ProRail has progressed with its plans and what still needs to be done in The Hague. Because only half of the 70 million needed has been painstakingly promised by the cabinet. So the most important job is on the menu first: the expansion of Meppel station with a fourth platform.
Trains on the track between Meppel and Zwolle now have to pass through a so-called bottleneck. According to Danou Veenhof, regional director at ProRail, that bottleneck actually consists of two parts. One part is the cramped station in Meppel where all intercity trains and slow trains have to pass through.
“If you are going to expand Meppel with a fourth platform, you can separate the intercity trains and local trains by giving them all their own arrival and departure platform. Then there are fourteen level crossings on the short stretch between Meppel and Zwolle,” Veenhof explains. “If something goes wrong now, en route from Zwolle to Meppel or at Meppel station, it will immediately have consequences for all train traffic from the north to the rest of the country and vice versa.”
Because all train traffic to the Northern Netherlands runs via Meppel. “As long as a Lely line through the polder to the north or a Lower Saxony line from Groningen via Emmen to Twente is not available, this is the only rail access to and from the north,” deputy Henk Jumelet agrees. “At the same time, this is an easy problem to solve, which when it comes to rail infrastructure, it is a very small amount.”