From Monster Drawings to Nanoseconds: How an 8-Year-Old Saved the NS’s Reputation
It’s Wednesday afternoon at Groningen’s main station. The rain is just holding off, but the atmosphere is still buzzing. A small group of travellers stop in their tracks, pointing and grinning. There, on platform 4a, it stands: the monster train. It’s a beauty, but this one has teeth, eyes, and a couple of hefty claws curling around its side. It’s the brainchild of 8-year-old Phileine, who’s standing next to it, positively glowing. And honestly? This is the best thing to happen to NS in ages.
We all know the feeling. You’re stuck on yet another delayed intercity, spill coffee down your trousers, and swear you’ll write a strongly worded letter to NS Reizigers B.V. The NS’s reputation? Let’s just say it hasn’t exactly had 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 run. No stiff PR stunt, just a genuine smile.
I was there when she got off. The grin on her face was wider than the nose on the Honda NSX I saw tearing down the Autobahn years ago. Only this was quiet joy. A conductor told me her design stood out among a sea of others. And you know what’s the best part? While the rest of the country was moaning about delays of a few minutes, this train was bang on time. Right down to the nanosecond it rolled into the station. As if time itself decided to play along for an 8-year-old.
I overheard a father saying to his son, “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 see where a website was really 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 gone, and found them again in her own monster scribbles.
So, what makes this so special? Let me tell you:
- Perfect timing: Just as the debate over timetables and fines was flaring up again, along came this initiative. Not a press release, but a real-life monster on wheels.
- It’s ours: The train wasn’t dreamed up by some marketing agency in Amsterdam, but by a little girl from Zutphen. That makes it authentic.
- It breaks the monotony: Travel is often just from A to B, head down, earbuds in. Today, people looked up. They pointed. They laughed.
And then there are the details on that train... I saw a monster holding onto a platform pole like it was a lolly. Another one had wheels with eyes that watched you the whole ride. It’s almost a shame this train isn’t being used on international routes as a standard thing. Just imagine: NS International to Berlin, but with a grinning dragon on the side. Now that would be a conversation starter.
Phileine walked along the carriages with her dad. She was wearing a tiny backpack, looking like she’d just been on a world tour. Her father told me she’d been working on the drawings for months. Every night, a new monster. Some were scary, others just a bit quirky. And it was that exact mix that caught their eye. It’s that unselfconsciousness. The thing we adults sometimes 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 kid, armed with felt-tip pens and paper, holding up a mirror to a state-owned company. And that mirror was full of monsters that were actually quite endearing. If you ask me, we need more of that. Maybe they should do that nslookup at NS more often: searching for that spark of magic that’s still there. Today, they found it in a monster train.