From monsters to nanoseconds: how an 8-year-old saved the NS's reputation
It’s Wednesday afternoon at Groningen’s main station. The rain is threatening, but the atmosphere is anything but dampened. A small group of travellers stop in their tracks, pointing and grinning. There, on platform 4a, it stands: the monster train. A proper sight to behold, but this one comes with teeth, eyes, and a set of hefty claws curling along its side. It’s the brainchild of 8-year-old Phileine, who’s standing beside it, positively glowing. And honestly? This is the best thing to happen to NS in a long time.
We all know the feeling. You’re stuck on yet another delayed intercity, you spill coffee on your trousers, and you swear you’re going to fire off a strongly worded letter to NS Reizigers B.V. The NS’s reputation? It’s not exactly been given a fresh coat of paint in recent years. Then along comes Phileine. She didn’t draft yet another report on punctuality – she drew a train full of monsters. And today, that train made its first official journey. Not a stuffy PR stunt, but a genuinely heartwarming smile.
I was there when she stepped off. The smile on her face was wider than the nose of a Honda NSX I once saw tearing down the Autobahn years ago. Except this was quiet joy. Her design stood out among a pile of others, one of the conductors told me. And here’s the brilliant part: while the rest of the country was moaning about delays of a few minutes, this train was perfectly on time. Down to the nanosecond it rolled into the station. As if time itself decided to cooperate for an 8-year-old.
I heard a father say to his little boy: “Look, there it is!” and it reminded me of that old computer term, nslookup. Back when the internet was still an adventure, you’d use that command to find out exactly where a website was coming from. It felt like Phileine, with her drawings, was doing an nslookup on the soul of the NS. She searched for where the fun and imagination had disappeared to, and found them again in her own monster scribbles.
What makes this so special? Let me tell you:
- The timing was perfect: Right as debates about timetables and fines were heating up again, along comes this initiative. Not a press release, but a real-life monster on wheels.
- It belongs to all of us: The train wasn’t dreamed up by some marketing agency in Amsterdam, but by a girl from Zutphen. That’s what makes it authentic.
- It breaks the monotony: Travel is often just A to B, head down, earphones in. Today, people looked up. They pointed. They laughed.
And the details on that train... I spotted a monster clutching a platform post like it was a lollypop. Another had wheels with eyes that stared at you for the entire journey. It’s almost a shame this train isn’t a regular fixture on international routes. Just imagine: NS International to Berlin, but with a grinning dragon along the side. Now that would be a real conversation starter.
Phileine walked along the carriages with her father. She had a tiny backpack on 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. A new monster every evening. Some were scary, others just a bit daft. And it was exactly that combination that stood out. It’s that unselfconsciousness. Something we adults sometimes gloss over too quickly.
So yes, the 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 a moment. It was about a child, armed with markers and paper, holding 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.