 Hey everyone, and a big welcome back to High Speed Rail Explained. We've covered lots of high speed rail systems on this channel, and we'll be making refreshed videos on some of the world's great high speed rail networks. So if you live near or regularly use a high speed rail line, shoot me an email so we can bring your high speed rail system an updated video. Today we're talking about high speed rail in Belgium and the Netherlands. We've never done a combined episode before, but in this case, the high speed rail services and infrastructure are so highly integrated that it only makes sense. What might surprise you is the fact that the Netherlands and Belgium have high speed rail in the first place. For one, the combined populations of the countries is just 27 million or so, and yes yes I know that is a lot of people. But we aren't talking about countries the size of China or India, and not even France or Germany here. At the same time, these just aren't physically large countries. You can draw a line from Amsterdam to Brussels, via the Hague, Rotterdam and Antwerp, and it's less than 200 kilometers. So what high speed rail routes exist in these countries, why do they exist, and what can they teach us about high speed rail? Let's dive in to find out. As always for an explainer, I have to start with a rough overview around the places we'll be talking about, which in today's video is the Benelux, or the Low Countries, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, which sit in the corner of continental Europe, between France and Germany. Unfortunately, high speed rail doesn't actually go to Luxembourg, which is why it's not in the title. The largest cities in this area, based on the greater metropolitan population, are Amsterdam, Brussels, Rotterdam, Antwerp and the Hague. And I should point out that, fun fact, one of the longest tram lines in the world actually runs the length of Belgium's coast, and I have a previous video on that. Funny. For a bit of international context, just east of Belgium and the Netherlands and Germany is the major Ryan-Roe region, which has a number of major cities from Cologne to Dusseldorf, as well as Essen and Bonn, and of course everyone's favorite Ryan-Roe region urban area, Wuppertal. Just across the border in the direction of France is Lille, while London sits roughly 300km west of Rotterdam across the English Channel. Now that we've established the basic geography of the region, let's take a look at the high speed rail. The lines of what now form the high speed rail network of Belgium and the Netherlands started coming together in the late 1990s, when the LGV Nord, which also carries Euro-star trains from the UK, was built not too far from the Belgian border in Lille. We'll come back to this shortly. From Lille, a number of new lines or line segments have been built to create what is a very nicely developed high speed rail network, starting with HSL1, which connected from Lille to Brussels in 1997, HSL2, which connected from east of Brussels to southeast Belgium in 2002, and then HSL3, which connected from southeastern Belgium to near the German border in 2009, which was an eventful year for high speed rail in this part of the world. Unfortunately, the high speed line does not continue in Germany. This means that while the lines can speed up longer intercity journeys, they don't necessarily mean point to point high speed rail from Belgium to Germany. That same year in the Netherlands, HSL South or South opened, connecting Rotterdam and Amsterdam, which are rather close together, with just about 60km between them. At the same time, this was interlinked with another new section of high speed line to connect Amsterdam to Antwerp via Rotterdam. Now all of these lines are built to European standards, with top speeds of 300km per hour, and all of them use ETCS level 2, except for HSL2, which uses ETCS level 1, and HSL1, which uses French TVM tech, also used on the British side of the channel tunnel on high speed 1. As you'd probably expect, electrification is also at the very much standard 25km vac. This is despite conventional railways using 3000v DC in Belgium and 1500v DC in the Netherlands, something which they are considering raising for more power. Now you might have noticed that the network does leave a somewhat problematic gap between Antwerp and Brussels. Part of this has been filled by this Sportline 25N, which was built out in the 2010s, but this line is not used at its top design speed of 200km per hour and instead at 150km per hour for some reason, which could be power or signaling related. Similar situations exist in Sweden, for example, as I discussed in that High Speed Rail explained. Of course, unlike in say Japan, high speed rail lines also do not extend directly into the centres of the largest cities anyway, and so conventional line compatibility is already something these high speed trains have. The question posed at the top is also important, given how small the Netherlands and Belgium are, what role does high speed rail play for them? Well, one answer is clearly international travel, including between the two countries, which is where a lot of the high speed rail services are oriented, and this does have clear benefits in limiting the size of airports required by the various cities as well as highways, not to mention the more environmentally friendly, convenient and space efficient nature of rail. International trains run on a number of different services, the first of which I'll talk about are from Tallis, which provides hourly high speed trains from Amsterdam to Paris that stop at all major destinations in between, including Amsterdam Schiphol Airport. There are also two additional Brussels to Paris trains every day, while on weekends there's a daily train that goes to Charles de Gaulle Airport and Chessie, providing access to Disneyland Paris. Tallis also provides five trains a day from Paris to Gologne and Dusseldorf via Brussels. Tallis operates a fleet of fully TGV derived trainsets, of which the older are triple voltage, capable of operation on high speed lines and the Belgian and Dutch mainline networks as well as newer quad voltage sets, which can also operate in Germany. Speaking of trains to Germany, Deutsche Bahn also provides intercity express services from Brussels to Gologne, six per day in fact, and they continue onwards to Frankfurt Airport and Frankfurt proper. There are also two daily intercity express services from Amsterdam to Basel in Switzerland via Utrecht, Gologne and Frankfurt. These services are provided using ICE3M trains from the Siemens Velaro family. Finally, you have the Eurostar services, which can't actually be used for trips entirely in the EU. Passengers travelling towards the UK via the Channel Tunnel need to do a passport check, which isn't super well implemented at the stations in the Netherlands in particular. It might actually make more sense to do something like what Amtrak does on trains entering Canada, and check passengers before they disembark their Eurostar train in London. Eurostar operates three daily services to Brussels from London with a stop in Lille, which has a very cool giant high speed rail Y to itself that enables Eurostar services on its north and west legs and talus on its southeast. There are also four daily Eurostar trips that run from Amsterdam to London, stopping in Rotterdam, Brussels and Lille. Eurostar operates a mix of very long nearly 400 meter TGV derived E300 sets and E320 sets which are based on the Siemens Velaro platform. If there is one thing that would be great to see more of, it would be airport connections. There are still numerous flights between Chaldeaux and Schiphol for example, despite their direct high speed rail link to one another, albeit with only one daily service operated two days a week. This should be able to substitute for a lot of flights, especially as both KLM and Air France are Sky Team members. This could potentially be extended to Frankfurt, which is another major European hub airport. Now I've talked a lot about international service, but the lines are also used domestically, just not necessarily how you would expect. For more on this, I'll pass it over to a friend in the Netherlands. Thanks Ries. One of my favorite things about the Belgian and Dutch high speed network is how much the high speed lines are used by non high speed trains. There are generally only one or two true high speed services per hour, so it's nice that the spare capacity of the high speed lines is used to speed up conventional rail services as well. The most extreme example of this is the HSL South between Amsterdam and Rotterdam. In addition to the 19 high speed trains per day in each direction, it's used by 83 conventional trains per day, which are all NS Intercity Direct trains. The Intercity Direct is by far the most frequent conventional train service on the high speed lines in Belgium or the Netherlands. As of 2022, the service pattern consists of one train per hour from Amsterdam Central to Brussels South via Rotterdam in Breda, two trains per hour just from Amsterdam to Breda and an additional two trains per hour just between Amsterdam and Rotterdam. There's also a second route which has two trains per hour from Den Haag to Eindhoven, which also uses the HSL between Rotterdam and Breda. Intercity Direct services are currently operated by Bombardier tracks locomotives with a top speed of 160 kilometers an hour, which is barely half of the 300 kilometer an hour speed limit on those lines. The predecessor to the Intercity Direct, known as FIRA, actually used 250 kilometer an hour trains starting in December 2012, but due to catastrophic reliability issues, those trains were removed from service after only 39 days and were returned to the manufacturer. As you can imagine, that's quite a story in itself, but we need a whole other video to cover that. Within Belgium, there are two other ordinary Intercity services which use the high speed lines. On weekdays during the peak periods, there's an hourly shuttle service from Nordenkampen to Antwerpen Central, which alternates with the hourly Intercity Direct service to provide a blended 30-minute service for commuters in the Antwerpen. The Belgian Intercity service, which makes the most use of the high speed rail network, is the Intercity Line 1 from Ostende to Eupen, which runs hourly and uses HSL 2 between Leuven and Liege. Unlike with the Nordenkampen shuttle, the NMBS does try to ensure that the trains allocated to IC1 all have a top speed of 200 kilometers per hour. As a result, the line is able to average 131 kilometers per hour between Leuven and Liege, which is the highest average speed of any conventional train in Belgium or the Netherlands. There are also a few special conventional trains which use the high speed lines in Belgium, such as the summer Göstexpress trains which run a couple times a day from Liege to the Belgian coast at De Panne. The Eubébé night jet sleeper train from Brussels to Vienna also uses HSL 2 and HSL 3 as it travels east-west through Belgium. In the next couple years, some big changes are planned for the Intercity Direct in the Netherlands. Most importantly, a new fleet of Alstom Karadia Stream trains, known locally as Intercity Nieuhegeneratie or ICNG, will finally replace the rented Bombardier Trax locomotives on Intercity Direct services starting in 2023. These new trains will increase the speed of those services from 160 kilometers an hour to 200 kilometers per hour on the high speed lines. Also in 2023, NS plans to increase the frequency of the Intercity Direct mainline from five trains per hour to six and extend the services to the north of the Netherlands, with branches heading to Leewaarde in Groningen. In order to provide a more direct route to the north and reduce train traffic congestion at Amsterdam Central, the line is planned to bypass the center of Amsterdam and instead serve Amsterdam South Station. An interesting feature of this extension is that it runs along the Hansen Line, which is almost a high-speed railway. At the moment, trains on that line are limited to 140 kilometers an hour, since they're still operating under the old Automatis Treinbe inbluting signalling system. But the line is also equipped with ETCS and trains using it are permitted to operate at 200 kilometers per hour. The ICNG fleet is also equipped with ETCS, so in theory it should be able to reach 200 kilometers an hour between Lelystel and Zwolle. But according to the NS website, they still haven't decided at which speed they'll actually operate along the line, and it could be as low as 160 kilometers per hour. Countries around the world could learn from the way that Dutch and Belgians use the spare capacity on high-speed lines to also speed up conventional rail services. For example, I find it unfortunate that as part of California's high-speed rail plan, the Amtrak Sound Joaquin service will be truncated at Merced, forcing everyone to transfer to a separate HSR train just to continue to Bakersfield. The trains that Amtrak California uses on the Sound Joaquins can run at 200 kilometers per hour and are physically compatible with the new high-speed line, so it would technically be possible for the Sound Joaquins to run along the high-speed line and serve the local stations, such as Merced, Madeira, and Kings Tulare, while the 350 kilometer an hour trains between San Francisco and L.A. make limited stops. All the minor stations along the California HSR line will have passing tracks, which would make it possible for slower services to share the line without slowing down those fastest high-speed rail services. The main reason this isn't planned to be done is that the U.S. Federal Rail Administration does not currently allow conventional trains to share the line with trains operating at very high speed, the way that it currently happens in the Netherlands and Belgium. Especially as more countries build high-speed lines and more cities consider building higher-speed regional rail services, such as Delhi with its RRTS and Seoul with its GTX, especially in smaller urban areas or on routes where intercity travel demand may not take up all of the capacity of a high-speed line, it may be worth considering how both of these uses can come together and create more benefit for more different types of trips. Of course, in the more immediate future, changes can probably be expected. For one, the service from Amsterdam to Cologne is likely to get faster, as with other routes over time, as signaling transitions from mixed to fully ETCS. This will allow trains to run at 160kmh for more of their route. Another thing you might not have realized is that Eurostar and Tallis have merged, and will now simply all be Eurostar. At the same time, service could change substantially. Both rail networks have ambitions for longer distance and through services, so who knows what might happen on this front. Further in the future, there's also discussion of a true high-speed rail corridor direct from Amsterdam to Cologne via Utrecht. This is unlikely to be truly high-speed in the Netherlands, but portions of that may be built within Germany, and this could cut travel times and provide direct Amsterdam to Western Germany service. As it stands though, this is the high-speed rail of Belgium and the Netherlands. There's not a ton of wild plans for the future, but that means you've probably already got a pretty solid network. Thanks for watching, and we'll see you in the next one.