Nederlandse Spoorwegen

Nederlandse Spoorwegen (NS) is the main public transport railway company in the Netherlands. It uses the tracks and other railway network infrastructure supplied by ProRail.

It is fully owned by the Dutch state. There are plans for a share issue to the public in future.

NS shares a common tariff system with the four other passenger train operating companies in the country.

Divisions of NS:

• NS Reizigers (NSR) (NS Travellers, responsible for passenger train services and for employing train drivers and conductorss)
• NS Stations (in charge of the operation of railway stations, including supplying space for the many small shops and kiosks)
• NedTrain (trains)
• NS Vastgoed (owns 48 km² of land, often near stations, and develops and operates these areas as public traffic nodes, offices and apartments)
• NS Commercie (marketing, sales and customer service)
• NS Internationaal (operator, in conjunction with NS Reizigers and foreign partners, of international trains such as the Thalys, the ICE, the night train to Paris in summer, and charter trains)
• Nedkoleje, in a joint venture with Polish Railways (PKP), operates trains in West Pomeranian Voivodship (Zachodniopomorskie), Poland.
• NedRailways, in a joint-venture with Serco, has won a concession for 25 years to operate Merseyrail services in and around Liverpool, UK.

In dealing with the general public these distinctions are not made and the terms Nederlandse Spoorwegen and NS are used.

NS has contracts with Connexxion and BBA for the provision of bus services to replace train services in the case of planned and unplanned cancellations.

There is a delay refund scheme entitling passengers to a partial or full refund of the ticket price if a journey is delayed by half an hour or more, except for short-distance journeys and cases in which the delay is the result of planned cancellations that were announced some days in advance. The refund is not conceived of as monetary compensation for lost time but rather as a reduction in charges where a poor service has been provided. The costs to NS of this scheme are kept manageable by not overstreamlining the claim procedure for passengers: many do not claim because the system is perceived as cumbersome. Part of the cost of the scheme is paid by ProRail, since they are responsible for part of the delays.

NS has announced that tobacco smoking will be forbidden on more and more trains in the second half of 2003, and on all trains from 2004. The gradual nature of the process is because it takes time to remove ashtrays or weld them shut, and to place no-smoking signs. In addition, all new carriages are no-smoking.

The smoking of cannabis is already forbidden, though it happens occasionally and is perhaps not as severely punished as in some other countries.

Since June 2003 the sale of coffee, soft drinks, beer, sandwiches, candy, etc. has ceased aboard domestic trains. The increasing number of convenience stores on railway stations and the relatively short duration of most train journeys in the Netherlands have lowered the demand for on-train services.

Conductors have a small computer called Railpocket with timetable and fares information. The latest version is the HP iPaq h4350 Pocket PC, which can communicate through Bluetooth with their new Sony Ericsson T610 GPRS-telephone.

See also Transportation in the Netherlands, Trains in the Netherlands, Train routes in the Netherlands.

External link: http://www.ns.nl/