Disastrous start to 80 weeks of Dutch-German border works

Don’t even get the rail freight operators started. They are furious about the first three weeks of the 80-week period, during which work is being done on the track in Germany that connects to the Dutch Betuwe line. “We still have 77 weeks to go”, sighs a manager of customer service and planning of freight carrier Rail Force One.

The 80-week period began on 1 November with a three-week long total closure of the “Hollandstrecke”, which meant that all freight transport had to take place over (mainly) the Brabant line and (to a lesser extent) the Bentheim line. Those first three weeks were also extended by a day. The work was not ready on time. Then a long night was lost due to the repair of broken rails between Helmond and Venlo. And to make matters worse, there were strikes at the traffic controllers of Dutch infrastructure manager ProRail.

It was therefore not a good start to the 80-week period, says Hans-Willem Vroon, director of rail freight branch organisation RailGood. “And then there was also a little incident in Germany”, he says. “There was also no train traffic possible between Venlo and Viersen for almost 24 hours, due to security problems at the Kaldenkirchen traffic control post. Mechanics got to work on it, worked until a quarter to one at night, but were unable to solve the problem and simply went home. It was not until 8 o’clock the next morning that a new team arrived to look into the problem. In the meantime, trains were buffered or held at their departure station. Terrible!”

And so it goes on with the messages from rail freight carriers on social media. “That will be another 77 ‘fun’ weeks… Not a single train ran normally this week, if not the track in Germany, then in the Netherlands the tracks are causing problems”, says an experienced, qualified operations professional of a commercial company in rail freight transport.

‘Keine Fahrdienstleitern’

And there were more bizarre things. “For the first 2 of the 80 weeks, a large part of the right Rhein Strecke was out of action due to… and read along with us… no Fahrdienstleitern (train traffic controllers)”, another carrier reports. “This also caused trains to get stuck, which in turn caused new problems with our drivers, because they are bound by driving times, which are stricter for cross-border trains than national ones. For example, they are allowed to work a maximum of 80 hours in 14 days.”

Hans-Willem Vroon experiences it, reads all sorts of things about it and has all the misery dumped on him in all sorts of ways. Still, he says: “Deep respect for all operational professionals in rail freight transport to keep working hard with all these problems coming their way. And also for the ProRail people who are texting me and are, to put it mildly, getting a stomach ache from it: thank you and keep working on your end to clean up this logistical mess. Let’s all address those responsible and take appropriate improvement actions to prevent all these problems.”

‘Put an end to this as soon as possible’

The criticism is aimed particularly at German infrastructure manager DB InfraGO. “How on earth is it possible that during an 80-week diversion due to the closure and enormous reductions in rail capacity, the rail managers are delivering such poor performance towards their customers? Despite years of preparation. Rail freight transport between Europe’s largest port (Rotterdam) and Europe’s largest economy (Germany) and also the logistical artery in the Rhine-Alpine and North Sea – Black Sea corridors cannot serve its customers properly in this way and is therefore suffering commercial and financial damage.”

Vroon asks for “those responsible to put an end to this poor performance as soon as possible,” or to draw their conclusions and “let others do this.”

This article was originally published on our sister publication SpoorPro.nl.