These days winter finally arrived. Not only it’s incredibly cold, there is also a hard wind that blows the coldness in every crack of your clothing. Luckily we went for warm jackets early this year so we are prepared ;)
It even snows a little, so the coldness is not a problem. I just dislike wet coldness :)

Anyway: The dutch railway system can definitely not handle coldness. Every year in autumn there are delays because of leaves on the tracks, as soon as it gets cold there are delays because of ice on the railways and if by accident everything works fine you can expect something like a lightning striking the power supply of a central node of the railway system.
Ususally this happens at the station of Utrecht.
As for today, it was a combination of lightning and a crash of two trains that completely stopped the north-south traffic in the Netherlands. (I wonder why this always happens on fridays when Anna wants to come to Maastricht?)

Anna had just arrived at Amsterdam central station when it was announced that there is a problem in Utrecht and there won’t be any other trains to the south.
She managed to do a detour to Rotterdam (luckily :) ) and arrived here at eight; some unlucky people had to wait in the station of Utrecht until now (22:00h) and are getting free nights at hotels…

What I am always amazed about is the way “Deutsche Bahn” is handling these things. There is never a problem when there are leaves on the tracks.. probably the dutch trains are more sensitive or something like that ;)
And the thunderstorms apparently also don’t like the German train system, they seem to prefer dutch power lines. Oh well.. Murphy at his best.