Power outage causes chaos at Eindhoven, Den Bosch train stations

By Janene Pieters on March 25, 2019 - 09:33
An NS train waiting on the tracks (Photo: TahR78/Wikipedia)
An NS train waiting on the tracks (Photo: TahR78/Wikipedia). (An NS train waiting on the tracks (Photo: TahR78/Wikipedia))

A power outage halted train traffic between Eindhoven and Boxtel for hours on Sunday afternoon. This caused chaotic situations at the train stations in Den Bosch and Eindhoven, with travelers complaining on social media about being stranded. Some travelers were stuck at the stations for over three hours, NU.nl reports.

The outage happened at around noon on Sunday. Train traffic on the route only restarted over eight hours later. ProRail engineers worked all afternoon to try and figure out what the problem was. The outage turned out to be caused by a broken cable and a defective part in a technical cabinet along the railway near Liempde. The cable was repaired on Sunday evening. The defective part will be replaced at a later time.

NS deployed "a few dozen" buses to transport stranded travelers between Eindhoven and Den Bosch during the outage. But it was still "very difficult" to get everyone to their destination, a NS spokesperson said to the newspaper, calling it a "very annoying day". Travelers were also advised to detour via Nijmegen and Venlo, but trains on these routes quickly became overcrowded. NS could not say how many travelers were affected.

Photos on social media shows hundreds of people crowding the halls of the Eindhoven and Den Bosch stations as they waited for alternative transport. According to Omroep Brabant, Eindhoven station was so crowded that rows had to be formed with police tape. The same thing happened at Den Bosch station, but with crush barriers instead of tape. 

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