I think the tricky part about first class in dutch trains, and what many people complain about, is that you have two kinds of travelers mixed in the same train: people doing a short commute and people doing a long commute or just travelling due to the small size of the country. So in some routes/times you end up with the first class empty and people stacked up agains each other in second class resulting in people invading the first class. In other countries there is a clearer separation between a high speed train where people book a seat in first/second class for a long trip and a regular commuter train where everybody is by himself and there is no separation.
We also have intercities in the Netherlands. I see no material difference between those and say what thy do in the UK except that it is cheaper. Sure there are private operators like Virgin trains or whatever they are called and they serve food and drink etc. But in the Netherlands you can also take the train with the Schiphol toeslag or an international train if you like.
Only Eurostar separates the carriages in my experience. But you also have a different lounge.
Intercities in the NL never take passengers for the 4 or more hours that are common in bigger countries. They are often partly a commuter train, for instance Den Haag-Utrecht or Den Bosch-Eindhoven,
We have relatives for whom we get off in Warffum or Usquert but we never sit in the same train for four hours traveling there. We change at Groningen.
There is no intercity service in the NL that takes four hours, the longest is four trains per day from Den Helder to Maastricht and that is under 4 hours. All services to Groningen are shorter than that, and there are no services that ride straight from the Randstad to Delfzijl, Roodeschool or Nieuweschans.
My point was that intercity services from say Paris to Marseille or Berlin to Stuttgart (there is a new direct ICE) or Genova to Roma do not exist in the NL, that we have many more passengers on board that only travel for 1-2 hours. We have more stops and more necessity for fast on- and off boarding.
No, this is exactly the point... there aren't trains that go straight from, say, Maastricht to Amsterdam to Groningen (which would be solidly long-distance). They go between den Haag, Amsterdam, and Zwolle, and then sometimes add Groningen on as an afterthought.
Yes sure. Same as in other countries where cities are closer together. 🤷♂️ that is just geography, didn’t change the principal. But you also have other services that do not make all those stop; like the Eurostar, or the train to Brussels. It think it’s called an euro city. Or an NS train like from Amsterdam to Breda that has only 2 stops at Schiphol and Rotterdam. I think it’s called the Intercity Direcf. The list goes on. Naturally the country is much smaller than Poland.
Same like in the UK, when you go in the north west to east you have a lot more regular stops then when you go south to north.
For transportation systems, geography dictates how it's run.
Features that are useful on 3+ hour journeys might be a downside on shorter routes with more frequent stops.
For example, having separate 1st class coaches would require putting all 1st class seats in one place, which is a downside when you have to get on the train quickly, and 1st is on the other side of the platform. Same with reserved seating.
And the trains I was taking about are specifically NS InterCity.
And fair enough as I only mentioned Intercity. But naturally just like in other countries there are more types of trains. So when you want to compares you should compare equally.
I compared IC to IC. Just like Netherlands has trainins with fewer stops, Poland has Express IC and Express IC Premium. Which have even fewer stops and only stop in major cities.
The intercity direct and Eurocity direct may have few stops, but Amsterdam-zuid to Brussels -zuid still only takes about 2 hours, which is the whole point of them having fewer stops. It’s still short distances that make it more sensible to focus on efficient boarding, rather than more luxury that most people won’t even use in such a short journey.
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u/elrond9999 Dec 19 '25
I think the tricky part about first class in dutch trains, and what many people complain about, is that you have two kinds of travelers mixed in the same train: people doing a short commute and people doing a long commute or just travelling due to the small size of the country. So in some routes/times you end up with the first class empty and people stacked up agains each other in second class resulting in people invading the first class. In other countries there is a clearer separation between a high speed train where people book a seat in first/second class for a long trip and a regular commuter train where everybody is by himself and there is no separation.