NS and ProRail under fire during hearing about train failures

NS director Wouter Koolmees and ProRail CEO John Voppen encountered a great deal of criticism during a hearing in the Tweede Kamer on Tuesday. In particular, parliamentarians brought up the manner of communication with passengers, and the lack of alternative bus transport during the major train disruption in Amsterdam on June 4 and 5. More than 1,500 stranded passengers spent the night at Amsterdam Central Station.

Koolmees stated that apologies are in order, because travelers must be able to count on the NS, the Dutch national rail operator, and that was not the case that evening. Voppen was also "deeply affected" by the train failure.

"The promise is to bring people home at night," said the ProRail CEO. "It's hard for me that it didn't work out that Sunday evening."

The MPs said they saw a lot of room for improvement. For example, they pointed to the poor communication to passengers, who constantly saw in the NS app that trains would start running again, when this was not actually the case until 11 a.m. the following day. According to the two railway bosses, this is because the logistics system is linked to the passenger system. In the first system, technicians provided forecasts about the recovery, but those projections do not have to be realistic. According to them, decoupling those systems is not that simple. "Amazing," said D66 MP Lisa van Ginneken.

Harmen Krul (CDA) pointed out that many stranded travelers have therefore not taken advantage of the offer of a free hotel stay, because they kept hope that trains would run again. "That affects confidence, how do we prevent confidence from ebbing away?" he wondered.

Passengers association Rover, which was also at the meeting, said that the reliability of public transport is at stake. "It is worse with public transport than a few years ago," said board member Walter Etty. And that is a real problem, because the climate objectives should be used to win the trust of non-regular public transport users, so that they leave the car at home, he argued.

Finally, the Tweede Kamer wondered why buses were not deployed during the outage. According to Koolmees and Voppen, this was not logistically feasible because there were too many passengers, and they feared people would start fighting for a spot. Fahid Minhas (VVD) understood this, but doubted whether sufficient use of buses would have been possible in the event of a smaller disruption. Minhas wondered whether the contracts with bus companies are in order.

Barry Madlener (PVV) found it to be a "bizarre conclusion."