Mayor Marianne Schuurmans wants to make clear agreements with the NS about the cancellation of the timetable. After the technical failure at the NS last Sunday, almost all trains are running again, but it does raise the question of how it is possible that the technical infrastructure is so sensitive to errors that arise after software updates. State Secretary Vivianne Heijnen of Infrastructure and Water Management also believes that the NS has made "a very bad turn" with the train failure. 

No backup plan and especially no insight into actions that were taken when such situations occur. Rover, as a passenger association, is not pleased with the NS that failed to switch to a plan B, and that instead it was decided to shut down all train traffic throughout the country. In the event of a breakdown, the NS will use buses. Agreements have been made about this with two large transport centers in the Netherlands. Yet it remained silent and the NS indicated quite early in the afternoon that there was no question of using replacement buses. The official reason was that there are not enough buses in the country to accommodate that. If it had been used, part of the suffering for the travelers would have been solved, who were now stranded all over the country and were left waiting for a restart of the timetable.

It was only later in the day that no more trains would run on Sundays. Something that could actually have been foreseen, because NS has often proven in the past that it would rather wait until the following day to restart the timetable than at the end of a day. Perhaps also more difficult because there must first be an overview of where the material is and which employees are at which locations.

The outage was resolved in the evening. However, today it was not possible to indicate the reason for the malfunction, despite the solution. The question here is how to solve something when the cause of the malfunction is unknown? The spokesperson was unable to say anything about compensation for travelers in the morning program Good morning Netherlands, except to contact customer service for this. Not recommended in itself because customer service could not give advice in the morning either.

The NS called on travelers on Sunday to postpone their train journey due to a technical malfunction. That would initially last until 17.00 p.m., but at the end of the afternoon the outage turned out to be hours longer. The first trains were started after midnight. Those who were already on the road on Sunday had to look for other travel options.

Also read: NS is facing major problems on the railways