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Comment by ncmncm | Hacker News Reader

It wasn't the IT failure that kept the trains from running. It was management failure, not ensuring they could run without the IT system.

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That sounds unrealistic given the size of the problem.

They did it before the whole thing was automated. Surely they can do it again.

Sure, *but not on a single day without any warning what's ever*

I’m sure nobody raised this issue before. They just didn’t care “Don’t worry, the system will always work”.

But here we are.

The automation allowed running more trains than ever before using less personnel than ever before.

You want the train company to keep 2x-3x personnel on hand just for days like this? Not to mentioned transition time.

So, run fewer trains. Fewer is better than none.

I am not familiar with European train, but it seems that they did?

> The international trains are not affected by this failure.

> The night trains can still run.

That isn't useful for 99% of passengers. He obviously meant run a reasonable percentage of trains, like 25-50%.

Maybe we have different definition of fewer trains, because I wouldn't expect more than 10% at most, realistically 2-3%. And those trains are probably already 2-3%.

Many international trains were actually not running. I haven't read up on the details yet as I was away this weekend, but I think it was only short cross-border routes that still worked, but not much more. The night trains only started up past midnight. And anyway, even if more than that had run, night trains and international trains only run on a small number of Dutch train routes. The three daytime long-distance international train routes are: Amsterdam-Rotterdam-Antwerpen and onwards, Amsterdam-Arnhem-Duisburg and onwards, Amsterdam-Hengelo-Osnabrück and onwards (several intermediate stations omitted). The only domestic night service is Utrecht-Amsterdam-The Hague-Rotterdam. That's it. You can't fit any serious amount of domestic travel into those more than they already normally carry.

That was with about a third of the current number of trains.[0] Expect complexity to go up exponentially as you increase the train frequency.

[0] Extremely rough off-the-cuff estimate. They were obviously automating as they went along during the years.

They do have some kind of crisis mode where trains run back and forth between three stations, but maybe they had no way to trigger even that.

It's both. Even with a system you could run without it, having to fail over would still be a negative event.

Do you know anything about NL train management? Just curious, how do you even know this is a management fault.

Now we're getting somewhere!

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