Bad week for the Dutch Railway

The Dutch Railway, NS, has not been having a good week, in fact, this Monday NS reported the lowest punctuality score this year with 72.3% of passengers arriving to their destination with less than a five-minute delay, the average is around 90%. This week has been difficult due to several different factors. There were a few very unfortunate incidents between trains and passengers on the track on Monday. From Monday, no trains ran between Groningen and Groningen Europapark because of a land subsidence the day before after work on a bicycle tunnel, this would take a few days to fix. On Tuesday morning a car crashed into a train while part of a police chase near Oss, affecting the Nijmegen-’s-Hertogenbosch line. There is a overarching problem with international passenger and freight trains to Germany as works just across the border have begun. The list goes on.

On Wednesday evening Storm Conall hit the Netherlands, and I wanted to visualise what impact that had on the rail network. I put together a graphic which I shared on Mastodon. In hindsight compared to everything else this week, I think the storm justifying a code orange alert in most of the country with wind gusts of 100-110km/h may have caused the least impact to the rail network. Nevertheless, I wanted to run through a few snapshots of the country with the disruptions mapped out as reported by Rijden de Treinen between 27-28 November.

27 November 2024

In preparation for the storm NS already adjusted the timetable to reduce disruption. At 20:00 on the 27th, ProRail began work on a rail fracture near Bunnik, this was to last until 10:00 the next morning. This was unrelated to the storm as the rail fracture was discovered the day before. Traffic partially resumed at 10:00 when one of the two tracks was open, and full service resumed at 16:00 after the work was fully complete. This affected traffic between Utrecht and Arnhem especially between Utrecht, Bunnik, and Driebergen-Zeist where no service was possible until the afternoon of 28 November, NS therefore deployed buses on this route. This closure had knock-on effects on adjacent routes as well resulting in fewer Intercity services between Amsterdam Zuid and Utrecht Centraal, and between Arnhem Centraal and Nijmegen.

28 November 2024

On the morning of 28 November, just after the storm, the subsidence at Groningen gets worse pushing back the work that needs to be done to resume trains to Groningen-Europapark. On the other side of the country, a delay in overnight maintenance work results in no trains between Tilburg and Boxtel from 04:15 to 08:00.

Similarly, delays in work at Amsterdam Centraal resulted in service disruptions mainly between Amsterdam and Rotterdam which cleared up by 10:00 in the morning. To add to this, there were defective trains between Amsterdam-Breukelen-Utrecht and Amsterdam-Schagen which created disruptions between 08:00-09:00 as well. These service disruptions pop up most on the graphic.

At Nijkerk there was a report of a defective overhead line at 05:00 that affected Intercity services between Schiphol, Amsterdam Zuid and Utrecht and Arnhem to Nijmegen. Buses were deployed to compensate. NS was specifically mentioned in their article this defect was not due to the storm. Service by train resumed again around 11:00.

Fin

I thought this was an interesting exercise to put to use something I had built. It’s still a little rough around the edges, but I will be posting a technical write-up along with the source code in the coming weeks, it just needs some cleaning up first. A lot of TILs with this one.

Update 2024-12-01: Corrected transport tag.