From monsters to nanoseconds: how an 8-year-old saved the NS's image
It’s Wednesday afternoon at Groningen’s main station. The rain isn’t quite coming down, but the mood is anything but dampened. A small group of travellers stop in their tracks, pointing and grinning. There, on track 4a, it sits: the monster train. A real beauty of a machine, except this one comes with teeth, eyes, and a pair of hefty claws curling along its side. It’s the brainchild of 8-year-old Phileine, who’s beaming right next to it. And honestly? This is the best thing to happen to NS in ages.
We’ve all been there. That feeling when you’re stuck on another delayed intercity, coffee spilled down your trousers, swearing you’ll write a stern letter to NS Reizigers B.V. NS’s image? It hasn’t exactly been getting a fresh coat of paint lately. Then along comes Phileine. She didn’t draw up another report on punctuality; she sketched a train full of monsters. And today, that train made its first official run. No stiff PR stunt, just a genuine smile.
I was there when she stepped off. The smile on her face was wider than the nose of that Honda NSX I saw tearing down the Autobahn years ago. Except this is quiet joy. Her design stood out from a mountain of others, a conductor told me. And you know what the best part is? While the rest of the country was complaining about delays of a few minutes, this train was perfectly on time. Down to the nanosecond it rolled into the station. Like time itself decided to cut an 8-year-old some slack.
I overheard a dad telling his son, “Look, there it is!” and it reminded me of that old computer term, nslookup. Back when the internet still felt like an adventure, you’d use that command to see exactly where a website was coming from. It felt like Phileine, with her drawings, was doing an nslookup on the soul of NS. She looked up where the fun and imagination had gone, and found them again in her own monster doodles.
So what makes this so special? Let me tell you:
- Perfect timing: Just when debates about schedules and fines were heating up, this initiative came along. No press release, just a real-life monster on wheels.
- It belongs to all of us: The train wasn’t dreamt up by a marketing agency in Amsterdam, but by a girl from Zutphen. That makes it authentic.
- It breaks the monotony: Travel is often just A to B, head down, earbuds in. Today, people looked up. They pointed. They laughed.
And the details on that train… I spotted a monster clutching a platform pole like a lollipop. Another had wheels with eyes that stared at you the whole ride. It’s almost a shame this train isn’t a regular on international routes. Just imagine: NS International to Berlin, but with a grinning dragon plastered on the side. Now that would be a conversation starter.
Phileine walked along the carriages with her father. She wore a tiny backpack and looked like she’d just returned from a trip around the world. Her dad told me she’d been working on the drawings for months. Every evening, a new monster. Some were scary, others just a bit goofy. And it was exactly that combination that stood out. It’s that unselfconsciousness. Something we adults tend to rush past.
So yes, NS still has a long way to go with punctuality and customer service. But today, at Groningen’s main station, it wasn’t about the numbers. It was about a child, armed with markers and paper, holding up a mirror to a national institution. And that mirror was full of monsters that were actually kind of endearing. If you ask me, we need more of that. Maybe they should run that nslookup more often at NS: searching for that spark of magic that’s still there. Today, they found it in a monster train.