The high word is out, the state is the building consortium responsible for the construction of the high -speed line (HSL) between Amsterdam and hold the Belgian border liable for the defects in the viaducts on that route. The Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management believes that the Dutch Lakes Bouwconsortium, from the companies Strukton, Ballast Nedam, Boskalis, Volker Wessels Stevin and Vermeer, should pay for the recovery of those defects and its consequences: train loss and speed limitations. State Secretary Thierry Aartsen (Public Transport and the Environment, VVD) announced this on Friday. Just the recovery of the ten viaducts on that process costs around half a billion euros, ProRail recently calculated.
The building consortium dragged the assignment, which involves an amount of 4.15 billion euros, in 2000. But the promised flash train between Schiphol and Brussels never came. The viaducts cannot handle the promised speed of 180 kilometers per hour, for the time being no more than 80 kilometers per hour should be driven. And it will certainly take until 2031 before the construction errors are restored. The announcement of legal proceedings is a new step in the jousting about the responsibility for this Spoordebacle.
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Who can be charged with those inadequate building constructions?
For the time being there is no clarity about that yet. Not ProRail, which only takes care of the train service line on the HSL. The manager is InfraSpeed, a consortium of contractor company BAM and technical company Siemens. Rijkswaterstaat, client for the concrete substructure and the artworks (viaducts), points to the consortium, as responsible for the design and construction. Whether legal proceedings make sense depends, among other things, on the liability agreements in the tender.
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Who are the victims of those construction errors?
In the first place the traveler. In practice, the promised flash line to Brussels is more like a boomtle train. The promised time savings are often not achieved, while during the repair work, ProRail will be forced to adjust timetable even further. Car traffic on the adjacent A4 will also suffer from that work, ProRail predicts.
This is also a setback for NS. NS had a new start last year. For the process between Amsterdam and Breda/Eindhoven, new intercity’s were purchased that, after extensive test phases, could get 200 kilometers per hour. A line soon went through, when those construction errors became clear and ProRail imposed speed limitations. That was the umpteenth damper for NS since the opening of the HSL in 2009. Disruptions and unreliable service were followed each other. In the first instance, that was due to the moving equipment, with the low -point of the track of the Italian train sets, which was specially ordered for the route, the Fyra. Even then there was all the necessary wrong with the infrastructure along the process and the safety software.
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Is this disappointment falling from the sky?
ProRail is struggling across the board with a lack of money for overdue maintenance and management of the track. “The entire rail market is under pressure as a result of material scarcity, price increases and lack of maintenance personnel, ProRail wrote to the ministry in November 2023 in the 2024/2025 management plan. And, it was the warning:” Possibly the state of the HSL-Zuid infrastructure is still worse than expected. ” That prediction has come true.
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Is that promised flash line after 2031 or is there a legal tug of war in the pipeline?
It will not be easy to conduct legal proceedings on liability and at the same time gain agreement on the recovery process and the costs thereof. In March, ProRail informed the House of Representatives during a technical briefing about the construction errors and came up with a cautious estimate of the total repair costs: around 480 million euros.
The viaducts are too light designed for heavy train traffic and the anchors of the horizontal parts of the viaducts are too weak. This means that trains have to run slower. One viaduct, near Rijpwetering, has even more problems. There, a part of the dike is shifting on which the viaduct rests. It is unclear whether this is due to work in the past on the nearby A4. For the time being, the State Secretary has requested the Bouwconsortium for consultation. The outcome is unclear.