Some 500 passengers stuck on Brussels to Amsterdam train for hours near Antwerp

About 500 passengers were stuck on the train from Brussels to Amsterdam for nearly five hours on Tuesday night. The train broke down near Antwerp around 7:00 p.m. The passengers were only taken off the train around midnight, VRT reported.

“It is the Benelux train that runs from Brussels to Amsterdam,” a spokesperson for the Belgian rail company NMBS told the Belgian broadcaster. “The train has been stranded since 7:00 p.m. due to a technical problem.”

Technicians initially tried to fix the issue on-site, but that failed when another technical problem popped up, the spokesperson said. NMBS then decided to get the passengers on another train. That train arrived around 11:00 p.m. Emergency services helped passengers move from one train to the other, which took them to Rotterdam at around midnight.

On X, the social media platform formerly called Twitter, passengers complained about poor communication and being stuck in the dark with no water and no aircon.

The Dutch rail company NS also didn’t know what was going on, according to a reply on someone’s post. “Has NMBS indicated whether they will only take you back to Antwerp or whether you can cross the border? Unfortunately, we have not yet received any information from them,” NS wrote.