A black day for Dutch railing

[Melfice]

Speaking of black days.
They're now planning on experimenting with running trains WITHOUT a schedule in the Netherlands. At first on certain routes, but they're planning to do this on a larger scale later on.

So, technically, a train could come by every five minutes (yeah, RIGHT) on whatever platform's free.
The platform the train will be arriving on will be announced shortly before arrival of said train.

In reality, I see this happening.

That every 5 minutes thing?
Might happen. For about half an hour.
Then you'll have a good 15 minutes of no trains running there AT ALL, after which you'll have another 30 minutes in which every 5 minutes a train comes by. Rinse, repeat.

The platform thing?
On any station with more than 2 platforms I forsee a lot of running of passengers.
Not to mention that on those larger stations the announcer will be about a minute or two late once in a while and with an average stopping time of 3 minutes for a train... yes. You've guessed it.
A new national event/sport, similar to the running of the bulls in Spain.
Running of the Passengers! See who can stay ahead of a wild pack of commuters as they try to catch their train!

Announcers and the people keeping track of the network will be overworked as trains can arrive and depart at any moment, so there has to be a closer eye on stations and their platforms and switches.

I'm sure people can think of more problems with this.

[chevyrider]

Of course there will be a schedule.
We engineers have to drive on the second, like we do now.
The Dutch tracks are the most used in the world, so no liberty in the way of using them by us.
We also have to be in time on the final station, to change to an other track or train.
But the frequency will be so high that the passengers always have a train within a certain time.

The use of multi-platform is already common now, for instance at Schiphol Airport.
This is alone done for, for example track 1 or 2, standing on the same platform.
Thus walking 5 meter to the right, or 5 meter to the left.( no running up - or down the stairs.)
Making it easier to let in more trains in the station, if their original platform is still in use by a delayed train.

[Toni Babelony]

Sounds like OTTD without patches... I'll surely be confuzzled again when I'm back in the Netherlands. They have so many changes in the transport system whenever I return.

[XeryusTC]

Trains will have to wait for each other on some parts like what happens now too sometimes when a train is on a delay and a faster (express) train is sheduled tightly behind it.
Cargo trains that run during the day might have problems with passenger trains suddenly running somewhere in front of it while the cargo train is on a tight shedule.
Stations can get full with trains, making other trains have to wait longer.
People will have to watch which platforms are occupied and which aren't all the time, and make the switches behave properly for inbound trains.
Sheduling your trip somewhere will become a bit harder because you don't know when the right train arrives, sometimes you can get 3 different trains in the same general direction but only one of them is sheduled so you can transfer properly, if you just hop on the first available train this becomes way harder.

I don't think it will be very succesful, I like the way it is now and I hope the NS will see this too.