JJ was on the morning train to Maastricht and sent this email to Bruce in NZ. It is not quite verbatim.
On this misty morning at 8:07 AM JJ having caught the 6:30 from Haarlem to Amsterdam, then boarded this one – the lizard train at 7:07 bound for Maastricht.
I can see the fields outside, with the disembodied gates standing in isolation in the mist. No fences, no cattle troughs as the wide, deep drains serve both purposes. The water table is about four inches below the surface, yet surprisingly the paddocks are not boggy. There is a high proportion of sand in the earth (which used to be the sea floor), so it’s very free-draining. Just as well – water is everywhere.
We cross huge rivers and canals. They are edged with dikes, with much higher dikes set well back. The Dutch don’t fight the water, they manage it. Their philosophy is “Give the water somewhere to go”. Hence the double-diking – the land between the remote and close dikes is sacrificial. In a land where half of the country is below sea level, flooding is extremely rare. The last flood that caused serious loss of life was in 1953, when the Zuider Zee overflowed, killing 1800 people. The Dutch promptly cut the Zuider Zee off from the North Sea. Now it’s a very big fresh-water lake. A subsequent flood in the sixties created a series of secondary lakes on one edge of it. A bit more work with dikes and drainage stabilised it completely, and now the properties that edge the smaller lakes are worth megabucks. To put all this in perspective, more people are killed every year by floods in Bangladesh and India than the Dutch have lost in the last two centuries.
In the next decade, the Dutch will spend 600 billion Euros (man that’s over a trillion NZ dollars) on strengthening the sea-dike defences. These guys are serious about water management. Kaeo and Kawakawa would be very different places if New Zealand employed Dutch hydrodynamic engineers.
But I digress. The title of this is “The lizard train”. The train to Maastricht is a trap for young (and old) players. Maastricht is about 230 kilometres South-East of Amsterdam, and the train goes nearly all the way there before it makes like a lizard – the tail breaks off and goes somewhere entirely different! I was told about it when I started. Not so a colleague of mine who has been here about two months and wound up in the wrong city last week. He was very pissed off. He finally made it to Maastricht, where they all laughed and said “Oh yes, all the Amsterdam-Maastricht trains do that”. He then worked late to catch up on the time he had lost. At about eleven PM, he boarded the train to Amsterdam and fell asleep. Halfway there, he found that the train had stopped. Then the whistle blew. Funny. The train didn’t move. Alarmed, he got off and asked the guard what was going on. “Oh” said the guard, “for the last two trains of the day, only the front half goes to Amsterdam. The back half goes back to Maastricht”. So he had to wait there for the last train. He got home at 1:00 AM.
Next morning when he arrived red-eyed and worn out, we were all so sympathetic (not!). We laughed like drains.
So now it’s 11:45 AM, and I’m still on the Lizard train. The journey is usually about 2 1/2 hours. But the lines are out for maintenance, and they announced it to all the passengers in Dutch! The others got off while I was typing this, and suddenly the train was going backwards! I got off at the first stop and found out what was happening. They told me that it was all fixed and I should simply take the next train. Bullshit – the lines were still out. This time they made the announcement also in English, so I have had to travel a roundabout route. Teach me to not laugh at David!
Tags: canal, dike, maastricht, train travel, water
