Time crunch at Venlo to Germany

The Venlo train station has a great regional express connection to North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), Germany every hour operated by Eurobahn from 5 am to 10 pm. The station also has stoptrein services to Nijmegen and Roermond along the Maaslijn, where they go twice an hour in both directions operated by Arriva. Lastly, it has an NS Intercity service to Dordrecht via Schiphol Airport, which is also twice an hour. As good as the timetable is, the services that connect you to and from the German train could be better.

This was originally posted as a thread on Mastodon, but I will use this blog entry to elaborate a little further.

The problem

At Venlo, the most favorable connections to Germany have transfer times of 10 minutes or less. If you miss that transfer, regardless of where you’re coming from, you’d have to then wait in Venlo for the next train an hour later. You could take the safer option, but then your wait would be 35 to 37 minutes, which is illustrated in the image above.

Similarly when traveling from Germany to the Netherlands all shorter connections are now 7 minutes or less, but with wait times of 33 to 37 minutes if missed.

If you’re traveling from Germany to Venlo and wish to make the connection to the Intercity (which a lot of passengers do), you have 7 minutes to walk from platform 1a to 3. Walking quickly, this took me just over 5 minutes leaving me a minute and a half to spare. A passenger with limited mobility, unfamiliarity with the station, or heavy luggage might end up missing the connection altogether. It’s worse going in the opposite direction because then your next train is in an hour.

Improvements

Improvements could include using platforms 3, 4a, and 4b for the Dordrecht Intercity train, the Hamm (Westf.) regional express, and the Nijmegen stoptrein. This enables cross-platform transfers without needing the stars, this does leave out the travelers coming from Nijmegen to Roermond at a disadvantage as they will be using platform 1. This could be operationally challenging with all the track switching that needs to occur and now creates additional hard dependencies on each train needing to maintain block separation. Handling delays would only make this approach more difficult. Another point that might make this less than ideal is it would overload the platform with passengers during the transfer period.

Another possible solution could be to increase the transfer time by a few minutes to allow passengers to comfortably make the connection. This could also include coordinating delays between train operators if not already done so.

Lastly, the use of a Portal Gun to jump between trains might be the solution to everyone’s problems. 🤔

Workarounds

Having made this connection to and from Germany at Venlo multiple times over the last few months I devised a system that helps. Suzanne Veerman also pointed this out on Mastodon. If you’re traveling on the Intercity to Venlo, sitting on the last carriage allows you to leave by the elevator or stairs right upon arrival. From there you can go through the tunnel come up the other end and make your way to platform 1a. You can checkout with your OV-chipkaart both at the machines on platform 3 or by platform 1a, you could also checkout at the station hall but that would require a few extra steps. Every step counts!

Going from Germany to the Netherlands via Venlo, you could then do the opposite, sit at the front of the Regional Express (remember the train reverses at Mönchengladbach), this will leave you in prime position to make the sprint to platform 3. Similarly, you can also use the readers conveniently installed at platform 3 or platform 1a to check-in.