>>1197471You're not from here, huh?
The Dutch hate their railways beyond any reason and that's mostly because people here are infrastructure-spoilt as fuck but pic related also explains a great deal of it. Most mainlines in the extremely busy Randstad area (Amsterdam, Utrecht, Den Haag, Rotterdam, etc, basically all cities that matter) only have 2 tracks which is far below what the time tables demand. In fact the Dutch rail system is the busiest in the world when it comes to trains per track. Services are planned god tier but it still just isn't enough. Ofcourse it's nice that you can hop on a train in Utrecht that goes every 10 minutes and takes you to Amsterdam in 20 minutes but as soon as you enter the outskirts of Amsterdam the drama starts. Some intercity coming from the other side of the country is delayed (duh) and unfortunately intercity and local tracks merge before entering the city so you have to wait for the intercity to pass. It may be just 5 minutes of waiting but it feels like an eternity and meanwhile that stupid subway train that passed you already rolls into Amsterdam Central and you missed your damn transfer. Same with the signalling troubles that keep occurring in the Schiphol airport tunnel. Services here are god tier but when one thing goes wrong all trains are delayed. The system just isn't reliable enough. Everyone who relies on the railways is late to work way too often what gives the NS the horrible reputation it has. The amount of money spent on the skip-half-of-the-country-HSR could have solved that problem entirely by turning all those 2-track bottlenecks into decent mainlines which is a solid ground for rants imo.
