Dutch rail traffic falls flat across the country; Outage to continue at least to 4 p.m.

Railway traffic in a large portion of the Netherlands has ground to a halt, national railway NS announced. The problems were caused to a national failure of a telephonic system, resulting in signal and switching problems, the NS explained.

The problems were announced just before 2:30 p.m. on Monday. "All NS trains will probably not be able to run until 4 p.m.," the NS said. This will likely be extended, according to railroad infrastructure firm ProRail.

A spokesperson for NS told broadcaster NOS that ProRail was responsible for the communications problem. A ProRail representative said trains could be down for the entire day. Neither could state the cause of the outage.

Backup systems were being used to safely get trains carrying passengers to train platforms.

"Many trains of the regional carriers will probably continue to run," NS said. However, Arriva trains between Nijmegen and Roermond were also disrupted.

“If there are changes, we will add this to the travel planner on our website as soon as possible,” the NS customer service team said on Twitter.

Passengers were advised to check the most recent travel update prior to the departure and, if possible, postpone their trip to a later time.