this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2023
54 points (95.0% liked)

Europe

8484 readers
1 users here now

News/Interesting Stories/Beautiful Pictures from Europe 🇪🇺

(Current banner: Thunder mountain, Germany, 🇩🇪 ) Feel free to post submissions for banner pictures

Rules

(This list is obviously incomplete, but it will get expanded when necessary)

  1. Be nice to each other (e.g. No direct insults against each other);
  2. No racism, antisemitism, dehumanisation of minorities or glorification of National Socialism allowed;
  3. No posts linking to mis-information funded by foreign states or billionaires.

Also check out !yurop@lemm.ee

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] droogmic@programming.dev 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This is one only part of the corrective actions needed, the other half is improving regional mobility with trains to compensate:

The Dutch parliament is currently doing everything they can to help eurostar's monopoly on travel to the UK by trying to solve the immigration and customs issue in Amsterdam, but they are doing nothing or not enough for all the other less flashy rail travel initiatives. In clockwise order:

  • There is no fast international connection north possible from Amsterdam towards Bremen due to missing track alignments.
  • Amsterdam to Arnhem and beyond is being tripled, but mainly for freight. There wasn't even a speed increase to 200+ and I didn't hear much about increasing passenger train frequency.
  • Eindhoven - Venlo - Dusseldorf is missing a continuous IC connection and the German side of the Venlo tracks need doubling
  • A similar direct train to Köln is needed, either from Eindhoven or Maastricht
  • Many more ICE trains are needed that travel deeper into Germany, like Berlin, Frankfurt, Munich, Basel and beyond. They shouldn't all leave from Amsterdam.
  • Maastricht to Liege and Aachen should be high frequency IC routes, ideally starting further north in the Netherlands
  • Reopen the Roermond-Antwerp alignment for passenger rail
  • Continuing from Venlo to Eindhoven in the other direction, new track alignment is needed to connect Dusseldorf to Antwerp, Gent, Kortrijk, and Lille as a new mid to high speed corridor crossing 4 countries.
  • More competition in service providers on HSL zuid, why is Thalys allowed the monopoly.
  • The through traffic from Netherlands to France should not need to spend so long in Belgium, but that is being improved.

If air travel is then still competitive and bottlenecked on slot capacity, connecting Eindhoven Airport by rail and moving more flights there could help.

[–] hanze@feddit.nl 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You seem to know your stuff so I have a question, I know that they're currently working on the Friesenbrücke, the bridge between Weener (DE) and Leer (DE) which was destroyed a few years ago due to an accident. Arriva stated that they want to invest in a Groningen - Bremen line too, which hypothetically should make a Amsterdam - Bremen or even Amsterdam - Berlin line. Do you think that we'll see lines like that, perhaps even high speed, in the future?

[–] droogmic@programming.dev 2 points 1 year ago

I'm not an expert, but with the current implementation of EU policy I don't think we will see improvements in rail connections that aren't freight or the high speed core soon unfortunately.