Over half of railway embankments in Netherlands do not meet safety standards: report

About 1,400 kilometers of railway embankments do not meet the safety standards. The soil under the rail is too weak and can lead to derailments, the Volkskrant reports based on a study commissioned by ProRail. The rail manager says further research is required, but train traffic is currently still safe.

ProRail asked four engineering firms to investigate the railway embankments - raised areas of land on which rails rest. Since 2017, the rail manager has found several places where the embankments were too weak to drive over at high speed.

The study started in 2021. The engineering firms studied elevation maps, geological maps, and information from soil drillings. They concluded that 1,400 of the 2,600 kilometers of railway embankments are not strong enough to hold a stationary train at its full weight without collapsing - the safety standard.

The most vulnerable railway embankments are in the Randstad, the north of the Netherlands, and Zeeland. In those regions, the subsoil mainly consists of clay or peat, or a combination of the two, which is less firm than sand.

According to ProRail, the results prompted further investigation - which the four involved engineering firms recently started - but are no reason for concern about railway safety. “The safety standard is conservative,” Jasper Ingram, who coordinated the research at ProRail, told the Volkskrant. “Moreover, not a single [railway embankment] has collapsed in the 105 years. We, therefore, still consider train traffic to be safe.”

Ingram added that it is impossible to predict when an embankment will subside. “And we don’t yet know exactly what causes it. The chance of this happening is small, but the consequences are great. If a train runs off the track, it can lead to serious injuries and deaths.”

ProRail has imposed speed limits over some embankments and has even done repairs to some in Zeeland. But no restrictions apply to many vulnerable railway embankments. According to ProRail, they’re unnecessary at this stage, repairs would be extremely costly, and intervention would have big consequences for the timetables of NS and other carriers.

The Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management told the Volkskrant that “much is still unclear” about the quality of railway embankments and how that will develop in the future. “The track is used intensively, and we want to use it even more intensively in the future. That also demands a lot from the railway.” The Ministry stressed that trains can “currently run safely on Dutch railways.”