“Wrong kind of snow”
Winter weather always seems to cause trouble for the Dutch railways. All train traffic to and from Rotterdam, the Netherlands’ second-largest city, was halted this morning–during rush hour, no less–because a series of switches had frozen shut. All railroad switches are equipped with heaters, to prevent exactly this from happening. The heaters should turn on automatically when it gets cold or when it snows, but this time, they didn’t. According to a spokesperson from ProRail, the company that maintains the switches and other railroad hardware, we “got the wrong kind of snow today, so the automated heaters didn’t respond.”
Say what?
“If it’s cold and white, and comes falling from the sky as flakes, then it’s snow,” said a spokesperson from Rover, an independent organization representing users of public transport. And whatever kind of snow it happens to be, you would expect the switch heaters to work. Besides, today’s snow was of a very ordinary sort, weather officials said.
I’m generally quite happy with the Dutch railway system (contrary to Rover, who never do anything but complain), but ProRail really messed things up today. The Rover spokesperson summarized the situation nicely:
“We understand there will be problems with the railroad infrastructure when there’s a metre of snow, or it’s 25 degrees below zero, or there’s a hurricane,” he said. “But a few centimetres of snow in above-zero temperatures should never be the reason for a total loss of railway traffic.”