Joel’s Diary

It’s all in the information [Part 1]

So, this morning I wanted to travel, but in the end: I stayed home. It’s a story of information and how in this great age of the internet, the railroad industry is years behind…

Back in the old days in The Netherlands (ok, note quite since the beginning of rail, but say from 1945 onwards) there was one company to rule them all: Nederlandse Spoorwegen, or as it’s better known, the NS. They ran all trains: from passenger to freight, they were in charge of the infrastructure and of course, in charge of the train stations. However, in the 1990s, it was ‘privatised’ and several different business units were formed (still part of the NS Group), each in charge of a different section. Soon this was privatised: with NS Cargo becoming Railion, NS Infra (track and signalling, etc.) becoming Prorail and so on. The actual train stations are still part of an NS division called NS Poort (I think that’s the name) – which is the real estate side of the NS Group – as apposed to NS Reizigers which operates passenger services.

Now if you got all of that (likely you didn’t) then we now fast forward to the EU and the era of public tenders. The regional services are now slowly being given out to various smaller transport companies: we now have Veolia, Arriva and lastly Connexxion. This last one is really more of a bus company: that’s their core competence atleast. They do however also run a service between Amersfoort and Ede-Wageningen. Recently they’ve started services with new trainsets, named PROTOS. However, they’ve also had to return the sets they leased from the NS temporarily, as per the contract.

But, I’ll have to continue this fascinating story tomorrow…