Dutch Train Stations...

A mysterious "blockage" in Rotterdam leads me on a mystical hourney around the train stations of Holland.

Upon arriving at Amsterdam Central Station this morning, I hear a garbled annoucement which mentions passengers travelling to Paris. Hoping to travel to Paris that day I stopped at a ticket booth to ask for some clarification of the situation. Sadly, I had chosen to speak with an idiot who informed me that I could still reach Paris directly from this station.

So I went to wait by the monitors for my train to be announced, bought myself a sandwich and generally relaxed trying to pass the time as best I could. All the while over trying to ignore the announcements over the intercom which were telling me that "because of a blockage at Rotterdam. Passengers wishing to travel to Bruxelles and Paris must depart from Utrecht". Eventually I cracked and went to an information stand.

Thoroughly dissinterested the teller at the stand garbled a couple of station names at me and told me to go up and get the train on platform 2 to Den Boesch, then change to Rotterdam, where I would be able to get a train to Paris. On the platform, none of the names displayed were Den Bosch, but eventually I asked a uniformed man where to go and he told me to take the next train to Utrecht. Myself and several lost Belgians borded the train and off we went for the first leg of our journey.

When we reached Utrecht we were told to stay on the train to Den Boesch. At which stage we would have to change trains to Rosenthal. After several hours I reached Rosenthall. There was no train directly to Paris from here. In fact the closest thing was Brussels. Having no time to ask I boarded the train to Brussels, which was packed and I stood for the slow journey to Brussels South Station.

At Brussels I hopped on the TGV and I was back at Gare to Nord in just over an hour in my first class carriage (I'd gone for First Class since I figured it was such a long journey). A four hour journey in first class, had turned into a 6 and half hour journey across the train station of the Benelux nations and the delay also meant that my arrival back in Paris matched rush-hour on the RER exactly. What fun!

I'm off to write a complaint!