Transportation (Or: Trains, trams and… shopping carts?)

Niki

Aug 24

It's a random news day, I think.

The major train provider (NS) is in the middle of a strike. There are 5 days where workers will strike. Today was day 1, in the north of the country. Friday is this area's turn (The Hague, Leiden, Rotterdam, etc.). There are three more regions set to strike next week, with national strikes possibly following in September. Hmmm.

Northern train services cancelled in first of five regional strikes over pay at dutchnews.nl
NS scraps trains and reduces timetable as a result of staff shortages at iamexpat.nl. Even outside of the current strike, NS is seeing huge staff shortages. Who isn't, really?
But also: TUI launching Ski Express night train from Amsterdam to Austria in December at nltimes.nl. Although of course TUI is a travel company and not a train operator. The train leaves every Friday from Amsterdam, traveling through Utrecht on its way to Austria. You arrive Saturday in the mountains. You can even start skiing right away as the travel package comes with ski passes.

Not to be outdone, there was also a news story about Scheveningen getting a new tram depot in a few years. This is needed because the newer Avenio trams (Dutch Wikipedia) are wider and don't fit in the current depot.

Scheveningen krijgt nieuwe remise, want moderne trams zijn te breed [Scheveningen gets a new depot because modern trams are too wide] at omroepwest.nl, obviously in Dutch.

And, as the final form of transportation:

Albert Heijn ditches shopping trolley coin deposit system at nltimes.nl

Albert Heijn (a Dutch grocery store chain) has been using a coin deposit system to unlock carts since the mid '80s. As you might expect, this was to prevent carts from going missing. But this system was suspended in the last few years due to corona and Albert Heijn noticed that even without the system the number of "missing" carts did not go increase. So they decided to scrape it entirely. Personally I am not really affected since I don't have a car. No car = limited carrying capacity = shopping basket for me.

That was also the rule I lived by in the States, since I didn't have a car there either. Did you know "never having to learn to drive" was in the "pro" column when we were debating if I move to the Netherlands or if Marco moves to the States, way back when? Yep, I hate driving that much.

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