Dutch Railways: How All Railways Should Look

dear lovers welcome to railways explains on our channel we have already made a comprehensive video about the railway systems of switzerland and japan and today it is the right time to do the same with the amazing dutch railways while researching for this video we understood why there were so many comments on our channel with the request to make a video about this railway system the dutch railways together with the swiss railways have for quite a long time been the best performer on the european railway scene as the production of videos set this level of depth is quite challenging and time consuming consider supporting railways explained on patreon check out the link in the description for the great opportunities that we prepared for all our patrons now as always let's start with a brief history of the dutch railways the first railway lines in the netherlands were of course developed along the existing canals to threaten the position of the most important nation sports such as amsterdam and rotterdam and also to connect all other major cities the first railway line in the netherlands branded as old line was inaugurated on september 20th 1839 between amsterdam and harlem the extension of this line towards rotterdam was completed in 1847 the construction and operation were done by a private company whose name we will not even try to pronounce this was followed by the construction of the amsterdam utrecht line on december 28 1843 extended to arnhem in 1845 and up to the german border in 1856 these lines were initially built as a broad gauge however they have soon been converted to a standard gauge to connect with the german railway network since 1860 the state started to build its own railway lines and 10 such lines were constructed designated with the letters k except for j after 1870 a need emerged for more connections to less populated regions and smaller cities and villages moreover secondary stations were built on the existing lines which later supported the development of suburban areas which also gives us a good insight into the reasons why there are so many stations in the netherlands the first electric railway in the netherlands was the hopline line which was put into operation in 1908. from 1927 the old line was fully electrified and until the 1950s steam traction was fully replaced by diesel or electric trains the two largest dutch private companies whose names you can see on the screen ncs and ss began operations onlines that they built in 1863. in addition there were other smaller companies as a result of world war one the dutch economy had declined causing the ncs and ss to fall in terms of profitability however given their importance allowing them to slip into bankruptcy was not considered acceptable by the state so while remaining independent companies ncs and ss improved the overall efficiency by cooperatively integrating their operations the government of the netherlands further supported ncs and ss by purchasing shares in both companies in 1938 the authorities merged the two companies to form the nader lance's poor vegan or the dutch railways in the netherlands rally reform began in 1995 with the reorganization of the dutch railways through the organizational separation of commercial activities passenger transport freight operations and railway stations from infrastructure management within a holding company although infrastructure planning maintenance and traffic control remained within the dutch railways holding these functions were directly controlled and funded by the ministry of transport the freight sector that railway cargo became a part of the deutsche ban after its merger with raelian in 2000 and later into db cargo this was essentially the starting point for a sometimes arduous liberalization of the rail freight market complete institutional separation was introduced in 2003 leading to the creation of pro rail as the infrastructure manager both the dutch railways and pro rail were organized according to private law but ownership was retained by the dutch government 1995 also marks a change in philosophy in the public management of railways considering that the objective of the dutch railways must be above all commercial the government reduced its subsidies and divided the network between the lines falling under the public service and those intended for commercial operation in order to open up as many lines possible to competition the first experiments with decentralization and contracting of regional rail transport took place already in the 1990s in the eastern part of the netherlands the state-owned regional bus operator won the right to operate a short railway line by competitive tendering dutch railway started a joint venture branded the synthes with that bus operator and a subsidiary of the sncf group to operate an integrated bus train network a similar development has been seen in the north where dutch railways cooperated with arriva in a joint venture called the nord ned both joint ventures aimed at creating a synergy between buses and trains passenger service was increased by guaranteeing bus train connections and vice versa and by providing integrated tickets and passenger information in the years after reform the network was divided into concessions the main concession comprises the main profitable lines that is to say the main part of the network as a result the dutch railways was granted an exclusive right and duty to operate the entire mainline network until 2015 including both the profitable intercity trains and often non-profitable local trains on those routes the ministry of transport decided in december 2014 to award the new integrated main rail network franchise to dutch railways for the period from 1st january 2015 to 31st december 2024 the other concessions include secondary loss making lines ensuring a mission of pure public service without commercial interest these lines are entrusted to an operator after a european call for tenders in any case in the end each region decides on the offer and finances for the operations so the operator does not bear the deficit public transport authorities in the netherlands issue concessions for the following groups of lines dutch railways arriva netherlands keolis netherland conexion cubas and dutch railways international regarding the last one it's good to know that high-speed alliance won this exclusive contract while being a joint venture of the dutch railways and klm air france in contrast to regional tendering where the government subsidizes the concessionary this contract entails a yearly payment of 148.26 million euros by hsa to the state even though these regional lines form 25 of the dutch trail infrastructure they generate only around 10 of the rail passenger transport this means that despite the liberalization 90 percent of rail passenger transport is exclusively provided by the dutch railways anyway all operators use the common pricing system although they tend to use a separate tariffs this system is also valid in urban transport networks making the entire national multi-model and multi-operator network accessible with the same ticket the ov cheap cart regarding the freight transport the netherlands largest cargo carrier is the b schenker there are also others such as crossrail ers railways huffin and gutenberg care kell rail fortum and veolia cargo bearing in mind that 90 of passengers in the netherlands are transported by dutch railways we are going to use their reports to show the situation in this field the data regarding the infrastructure was extracted from the proray reports the dutch railway network is 3075 kilometers long but the total length of rail tracks is 7097 kilometers the reason for this disproportion is that only one third of all rail lines are a single track most main lines are at least double track sometimes even more like amsterdam utrecht with a quadruple track also two-thirds of the railway lines in the netherlands are electrified most of the network is electrified with 1.5 kilowatt dc which indeed limits interoperability with neighboring countries although belgium trains build for 3 kilowatts dc can run on the dutch network at reduced power in addition two special lines in the netherlands are electrified with 25 kilovolts ac it is a high speed line branded as hsl swede or high speed line south this high speed line is 125 kilometers long and links the amsterdam metropolitan area and the belgian border with a branch line to breda together with the belgian hsl4 it forms the shear pool antwerp high-speed railway originally scheduled to be in service by 2007 the public operations began on september 7 2009 another special line is the between route divitual route is a double track freight railway line that connects rotterdam and border with germany the length of the railway is 159 kilometers the story of the construction of this railway is so interesting it requires a special video on rallies explained for example works on the dutch part of the track began in 1998 delayed by two years the railway line was finished mid 2007 at a cost of 4.7 billion euros more than twice the original budget of 2.3 billion euros and more than quadrupled the initial 1.1 billion euros which was an estimate from the 1990. railways in the netherlands are not maintained by pro rail itself which is also quite interesting instead that job is subcontracted to a certain number of recognized maintenance contractors namely the dutch railway network is subdivided into 21 areas for each area all the regular maintenance is contracted as one package which is won by the contractor that submits the best offer bearing in mind that 2020 was the year dominated by the pandemic as regards the traffic we will take primarily data for 2019 and on the screen you will also see the data for 2020 just for the sake of comparison so in 2019 an incredible 165.4 million train kilometers were achieved on the dutch railway network let's drop this info here that the train kilometers in switzerland which has a 200 kilometers longer network is at the level of 151 million the punctuality of the dutch trains is another fascinating feature the percentage of passenger train arrivals for 2019 in which the difference between the scheduled time and the verified realization is less than three minutes was 91.9 percent the percentage of freight trains in 2020 for which the delay is less than three minutes at the final destination minus the delay at the point of departure was 70 percent let's be clear these are the freight trains that do not incur more than three minutes of delay only during the journey but this is still an incredible result in 2019 over 57 billion ton kilometers were achieved as one of the most important routes we could definitely mention the between route a fast freight only and direct link between the ports of rotterdam and zavanar at the german border with over 60 trains running daily the dutch railways in addition to transporting passengers in the netherlands since 2002 has a subsidiary branded as a billio abellio has been providing rail transport in parts of the united kingdom and bus services in london and since 2009 it has been providing regional rail services in germany as well dot railways is the largest provider of mobility services in the netherlands with about 11 million unique passengers every year given the total population of around 17.3 million this means that approximately 60 percent of all people in the netherlands use services of the dutch railways on a yearly basis during 2019 every working day dutch railways operated more than 5 000 trains in order to provide over 1.3 million train journeys and to transport 750 000 unique daily passengers the netherlands largest train station utrecht central handled an average of 194 385 travelers per working day in 2019 amsterdam central holds the second place with 192 1778 travelers what was most interesting to us as railway engineers is how the dutch railways are working on additional attractions and last mile connectivity of rail travel the answer is that the dutch railways is investing in other forms of transport did you know that around 45 percent of rail passengers cycle to the stations passengers have access to supervised bicycle parking facilities for 173 000 bicycles unsupervised facilities for more than 311 000 bicycles and 12 000 bicycle lockers at stations throughout the netherlands in 2019 the municipality of utrecht pro rail and dutch station department opened one of the world's largest bicycle parking facilities at utrecht central station which can accommodate twelve and a half thousand private bicycles and one thousand public transport bicycles also dutch railways has launched zone taxi at 377 stations across the netherlands for their passengers taking all this into account it should come as no surprise that only about five percent of rail passengers travel to the station by car but also have the possibility to park there furthermore in five years passengers satisfaction has increased from 75 in 2015 to 89 in 2019 factors contributing to that include enhanced operational performance and improved customer perception of their train journey for example as one of the key performance indicators they monitor the percentage of passengers who arrived to the train station five minutes prior departure regarding rebellio in 2019 abellio germany transported around 256 000 passengers a day while in the same period abella uk transported about 840 000 people a day in that year abello achieved a revenue of 3.69 billion euros of which 3.15 billion counts for abella uk and 534 million for abella germany of course pandemic disrupted all these trends and on the screen you can see how this pandemic is affecting passenger transport in the netherlands blue is the performance in 2019 and read is the performance in 2020 of course this heavily affected the financial aspect so dutch railways ended up in big deficit on the screen you can see the financial performance for the last three years now green deal there's that claim by the dutch railways themselves that from january 2017 every electric train on the dutch railway network now gets 100 percent of its energy from the power of wind in 2015 dutch railways and other dutch railway companies teamed up and partnered with energy company anacote to use its wind turbines to generate energy needed to power all the electric trains there's however a small problem for the dutch railways to use the wind power only the main farms must be connected directly to dutch railways power supply and continuity system and of course that is not the case the two dutch wind farms that have been contracted to sell power to dutch railways and rail companies are both connected directly to the european grid along with all the other power plants in the country and dutch railways draws power from that grid great power in fact reflects the overall generation mix which in the case of the netherlands is dominantly gas and coal with only a small contribution from the wind in that case only 10 to 15 percent of the electricity consumed annually by the dutch railways might actually come from the wind in any case we're not experts in this field and if anyone is more familiar with the situation we would be more than grateful if they shared their opinion in the comments an interesting aspect of the dutch railways is a fact that there was a significant amount of exchanges of knowledge and experience between the japanese and the dutch railway sector the delegation from the dutch railways visited japan in 1997 with the main aim to learn from the operations of the japanese railways in particular the aspect of complementarity between high-speed trains and regular train service in the context of the future opening of the high-speed services in the netherlands in the next decade and more there were several other visits from both sides all with the aim of exchanging knowledge and experience what is most often mentioned in the context of implementation of lessons from japan in the netherlands are primarily focused on high frequencies high capacity utilization and high punctuality integration of transport real estate and retail and focus on profitability precision professionalism and pride of personal with customer orientation also there were a train every 10 minutes experiments in the period from 2009 to 2010 lasting several weeks on the amsterdam utrecht eindhoven corridor to test the feasibility of increasing the frequency on the major corridors and realizing a situation where customers do not have to worry about the timetable for the next departure we can freely say that the result of these experiments is that the dutch railways launched a high frequency inter-city service between eindhoven and amsterdam with a train departing every 10 minutes this was the story of the dutch railway system on railways explained we hope you enjoyed and learned something new about the railways of the world don't forget to like this video share it with your real loving friends and of course subscribe to our channel and to help our production consider becoming our patron until the next time goodbye you

Channel: Railways Explained

Views: 392,227

Keywords: nederlandse spoorwegen, dutch railways, netherlands railways, pro rail, wind powered trains, holland, europe, best railways, NS, hsl zuid, intercity express

Id: gB5Ndn7CbpA

Length: 18min 59sec (1139 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 09 2021

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[u/[deleted]]

Is there anything dutch people don't do properly? Except for cuisine.

[u/Butteryfly1]

We Dutch like to complain a lot about the NS but the prices are actually pretty average for Europe and it has 95% punctuality which is top 5 in Europe.

[u/S3rs3]

Imho the trains here in NL are too slow and expensive.

[u/HenriquPereir]

Swiss railways are so much better than Dutch ones.