NS Is Running a Trial to Give More Train Passengers a Seat During Peak Hours
NS is testing a new way of managing train length during disruptions, hoping to reduce the number of overcrowded peak-hour services by a third.
If you have ever boarded a packed rush-hour train while watching a nearly empty one pass in the other direction, NS is now trying to fix exactly that. The rail operator launched a nationwide trial on March 9 that runs until the end of March, testing a new approach to how it manages train length when something goes wrong on the network.
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What the problem is
At the moment, NS decides how many carriages to attach to a train based on how busy that route is expected to be. A busier route gets a longer train, a quieter one gets a shorter train. In theory, this means capacity matches demand. In practice, disruptions throw this planning off completely.
Since 2019, disruptions on the Dutch rail network have increased by around 50 percent, caused by signal and switch failures, broken trains, collisions and planned track works. Every time something goes wrong, trains end up stranded at stations they were not supposed to stop at, or have to turn back early. That puts the wrong train on the wrong route.
NS says that on any given morning, around forty trains are sitting in locations they were not supposed to be in. As a result, one in five peak-hour trains is currently shorter than planned. For passengers, this means stepping onto a six-carriage train that should have had ten, with nowhere to sit and little room to stand.
What the trial actually involves
The trial tests a targeted fix to this mismatch. When a long train gets stuck at a busy junction due to a fault and has to turn back the way it came, NS will now prioritise swapping it with a shorter train coming from the other direction. This means some services temporarily become shorter while others get longer, for example adjusting from 12 to 10 carriages on one service and from 6 to 8 on another. Computer simulations suggest this approach can give more passengers a seat overall.
Think of it like redistributing the load. Instead of one very full train and one very empty train passing each other in opposite directions, both trains end up somewhere in the middle. Neither is ideal, but fewer people are left without a seat.
NS says the trial will see long trains shortened slightly, from ten carriages to eight for example, while short trains are lengthened in the same way, from six carriages to eight. This reduces the chance that a train ends up dramatically too short during a disruption.
What NS hopes to achieve
NS hopes to reduce the share of peak-hour trains that are shorter than planned by a third, and says the overall number of available seats across the network is expected to grow by a few percent during the trial period.
That may sound modest, but for regular commuters it could make a meaningful difference. A third fewer unexpectedly short trains means fewer mornings of standing in a packed carriage because the network had a bad day. NS has said the results of the trial will determine whether the approach actually delivers the improvement that simulations predict.
What this means for passengers day to day
The trial will not eliminate disruptions, and some trains will still be shorter than ideal on any given morning. Passengers travelling during busy hours may occasionally find their usual service has fewer carriages than normal. But the aim is that when this happens, the train coming the other way is at least a little fuller than it would otherwise have been, balancing things out across the network rather than leaving capacity piled up in the wrong place.
NS has not announced any changes to timetables or ticket prices as part of the trial. The test runs across the entire NS network through the end of March 2026, after which NS will evaluate whether to make the new approach permanent.
