From monsters to nanoseconds: how an 8-year-old saved NS's reputation

It’s Wednesday afternoon at Groningen’s main station. The rain is just holding off, but the atmosphere is no less lively for it. A small group of travellers stop in their tracks, pointing and grinning. There, on platform 4a, it stands: the monster train. A real beauty of a thing, but this one has teeth, eyes, and a couple of hefty claws curling over its sides. It’s the brainchild of eight-year-old Phileine, who’s beaming right beside it. And to be honest? This is the best thing to happen to NS in ages.

We all know the feeling. That moment you’re stuck in another delayed intercity, you spill coffee down your trousers, and you swear you’ll write a stern letter to NS Reizigers B.V. The NS’s reputation? It hasn’t exactly had a fresh coat of paint in recent years. Then along comes Phileine. She didn’t produce yet another report on punctuality; she drew a train full of monsters. And today, that train made its first official journey. No stiff PR stunt – just a genuine smile.

I was there when she stepped off. The grin on her face was wider than the nose of a Honda NSX I once saw tearing down the Autobahn years ago. Only this is quiet delight. Her design stood out from a pile of others, a conductor told me. And you know what the best part is? While the rest of the country was moaning about delays of a few minutes, this train was precisely on time. Right down to the nanosecond it rolled into the station. As if time itself decided to play along for an eight-year-old.

I overheard a father say to his little boy, “Look, there it is!” and it made me think of that old computer term, nslookup. Back when the internet was still an adventure, you’d use that command to see where a website really came from. It felt as if Phileine, with her drawings, had done an nslookup on the soul of NS. She searched for where the fun and imagination had gone, and found them again in her own monster scribbles.

So, what makes this so special? Let me tell you:

• The timing was perfect: Just as the debate about timetables and fines was heating up again, along came this initiative. No press release, just a real monster on wheels.
• It belongs to all of us: The train wasn’t dreamed up by a marketing agency in Amsterdam, but by a girl from Zutphen. That’s what makes it authentic.
• It breaks the routine: Travel is often just from A to B, head down, earphones in. Today, people looked up. They pointed. They laughed.

And those details on the train... I spotted one monster holding onto a platform pole as if it were a lollipop. Another had wheels with eyes that seemed to watch you the whole journey. It’s almost a shame this train isn’t a regular feature on international routes. Just imagine: NS International to Berlin, but with a grinning dragon along the side. Now that would be a conversation starter.

Phileine walked along the carriages with her father. She was wearing a little backpack and looked as if she’d just returned from a trip around the world. Her father told me she’d been working on the drawings for months. Every evening, a new monster. Some were scary, others just a bit daft. And it was precisely that combination that stood out. It’s that unselfconsciousness. Something we adults often scroll past too quickly.

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 for once. It was about a child who, with felt-tip pens and paper, held up a mirror to a state-owned company. And that mirror was full of monsters that were actually rather endearing. If you ask me, we need more of that. Maybe they should do that nslookup more often at NS: searching for that spark of magic that’s still there. Today, they found it in a monster train.