I’ve just got back from a very short trip to the Netherlands, which reminded me of how things can be run if not managed by utter fuckwits.<\/p>\n
I flew into Schiphol airport on the KLM flight from Lagos, arriving at 5:45am.\u00a0 The KLM plane is miles newer and better than the Air France equivalent from Lagos to Paris, by the way.\u00a0 And in business class you get one of those little alcohol-filled ceramic Dutch houses which line the shelves of Shell employees the world over.\u00a0 Immigration in Schiphol took one minute, and my bag arrived in less than five.\u00a0 And even while I was waiting I was able to buy a train ticket as in a stroke of genius you’d seldom find anywhere else in the world, there were ticket machines in the baggage hall.\u00a0 You’d never get such joined-up thinking in the UK, for example.\u00a0 There you’d get the train companies and the airport authorities shrugging their shoulders at one another each saying “It’s nothing to do with me.”<\/em>\u00a0 And you’d spend half an hour waiting for your bag, and a further fifteen minutes queueing up for a train ticket.\u00a0 Not that Heathrow, Britain’s largest airport, is even connected to the national railway network.\u00a0 You have to hump it into central London on the tube if you want to join up with that.<\/p>\n But the real genius in Schiphol’s design is that the railway station is right under the arrivals hall.\u00a0 And I mean, right under it.\u00a0 No traipsing for two miles to the “airport station”, whereupon it is another half a mile to the actual platform.\u00a0 No, you go down a short escalator and you are right there on the platform<\/em>.\u00a0 And there are about 8 platforms, as Schiphol is a mainline station and is not only served by local sprinters but also huge, double-decker intercities connecting you with The Hague and Amsterdam and other major cities right there.\u00a0 And there appears to be one every few minutes.\u00a0 All the signs are in English, there are timetables everywhere, and having still been sat on the aircraft at 5:45am I was walking into my hotel two stations away in Amsterdam RAI by 6:35am.\u00a0 Checking in took less than a minute, and when the desk clerk asked if there was anything else, I said “Yeah, it’s great to be back in Holland: everything works!”<\/em><\/p>\n After a quick shower and breakfast I went back to the railway station, armed with a ticket which allows me to travel on any train in the country all day for 48 Euros.\u00a0 One stop to Amsterdam Zuid, and I’d missed the train to Eindhoven by 3 minutes.\u00a0 But there was another one coming in 25 minutes, so I bought a coffee and waited.\u00a0 My train came bang on time, another huge blue and yellow double decker job, and I went up top.\u00a0 The seats aren’t the most comfortable, but the journey was only 1 hour and 30 minutes, so that wasn’t a problem. Out the window you could see canals, windmills, and lots of flat land.\u00a0 A major Dutch economic activity seems to be moving large quanties of earth and rock up and down the country on barges.\u00a0 One thing I noticed about these barges, a lot of them have cars parked on the roof of the living quarter\/bridge.\u00a0 My guess is that these belong to the crew so they can drive to work, move the barge around the country, then drive home when they’re done.\u00a0 Anyone know?<\/p>\n I didn’t see much of Eindhoven as I jumped straight in a taxi and headed for some industrial estate where I was having a meeting (hence the business class flight, heh heh!).\u00a0 But it seemed like a nice, quiet, small city.\u00a0 Although coming from Lagos, where doesn’t?\u00a0 A few hours later and I was headed up the road to Utrecht for my next meeting, somebody having offered me a lift rather than take the train.\u00a0 Like the Germans, the Dutch don’t seem to think much of jumping in the car and driving half the length of the country on a whim.\u00a0 I saw very little of Utrecht, but what I did see was clean and tidy and organised.\u00a0 I took the train back from Utrecht to Amsterdam, but for some reason the one I was on terminated at some tiny place called Breukelen and I was hoofed off.\u00a0 Not a problem though, because another train was coming through in 15 minutes, and I was more than a little impressed to find this station in the middle of nowhere had free wi-fi.\u00a0 Most major airports don’t have free wi-fi, and here was a tiny station in the middle of Holland which did.\u00a0 Back on the train, and in 20 minutes I was at Amsterdam Zuid and a short hop from my hotel.<\/p>\n The Dutch railway system is run more along the lines of a metro than a national rail network.\u00a0 You don’t really need to see what time trains arrive, you just turn up and get on the next one.\u00a0 And almost every other train goes to or through Amsterdam.\u00a0 Of course, the Dutch have a lot of things in their favour to assist with this: a very small country, only a handful of cities, one national train company, no pesky tunnels restricting train heights, nice straight lines across nice flat land, etc.\u00a0 But even so, the Dutch made sure they didn’t fuck it all up as most countries would have done.\u00a0 For sure, the Brits would have conspired to ensure getting from Amsterdam to Eindhoven would have taken three trains, the first being undersized, the second leaving from somewhere near The Hague and costing a fortune unless you booked two months in advance, and the third running via Antwerp and taking as long as the flight into Holland.<\/p>\n So, credit to the Dutch where it’s due: the Netherlands is one of the easiest and most pleasant places to visit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’ve just got back from a very short trip to the Netherlands, which reminded me of how things can be run if not managed by utter fuckwits. I flew into Schiphol airport on the KLM flight from Lagos, arriving at … Continue reading