Out of the carriage window … by Colin Boocock
In early 2019 Colin Boocock and his wife were relaxing in the train from Amsterdam on their way to Berlin. An early surprise awaited them. As the train entered Amersfoort station, Colin espied on the left alongside the station what looked like a museum collection of old electric and diesel locomotives. It was just a fleeting glimpse but he knew he had to investigate if ever he was in the Netherlands again.
An opportunity came quite soon. My wife announced that she and a friend were going to the Netherlands to sing with a choir group who had arranged to give concerts in Enkhuizen and in Amsterdam; the group was planning to use road coaches to get from Nottingham and Derby to Holland via ferries on the short sea route. I said I would attend both concerts but would travel independently, by rail. That gave me time to look around a country that I hadn’t visited for many years and to catch up on the changes that had happened. Of course, I had to include a visit to Amersfoort in my travels.
Those travels took in much of the country to areas I hadn’t previously visited including a city that was reclaimed in the 1970s from the Zuiderzee. On the way there I espied through the carriage window much else of interest as my train slowed to stop at Nijmegen. Standing in full sunshine in the yard was an old four-car green EMU of the type called ‘Hondekop’ by the Dutch (‘dog nose’ in English) due to the pronounced nose in the cab front; these were introduced in 1954. Obviously preserved since none have been in traffic for decades, this unit is owned by a group called Stichting Hondekop. Also occupying several sidings at Nijmegen were about twenty of the NS twocar DMUs of type DM90 that had been built from 1995 by Duewag in Germany. These relatively modern DMUs had been put out to grass because newer open-access operators such as Arriva and Keolis who had taken over local services from NS preferred to obtain the articulated units that I described in my article ‘A brief history of pods’ in TRACTION 256.
The next day, as my modern yellowand-blue double-deck EMU approached
Amersfoort I saw straight away that indeed the locomotives I had seen through the carriage window earlier in the year were still there, and what a collection! Most were in good external condition, painted in various colours ranging from red through orange to blue. Some were clearly types that had been operated by Nederlandse Spoorwegen (NS – Netherlands Railways) in the past. Closer inspection revealed that many carried the logo of a company called Rail Experts which I have since discovered is based in Soesterberg, a small town midway between Utrecht and Amersfoort. The collection included a couple of Alsthom B-Bs of the type that NS originally classified 1600/1700 and SNCF BB7200. The star exhibit for me was the Werkspoor/ Baldwin/ Westinghouse Co-Co No. 1251. I had seen one or two of these in the late 1950s but had not then been able to take a good picture for my collection. There were two Bo-Bo diesels from Belgium sitting at Amersfoort as well as a couple of former Deutsche Reichsbahn (East German) Class 110 B-B diesel hydraulics. I describe the various locomotives’ background history briefl y in the photo captions. This was truly an international collection.
I photographed what I could from the station platform, and then had some difficulty using my ticket to work the station barriers (why do people insist on calling them gates?). The lady inspector who helped me sort this out also answered my question about a museum by saying, “There is something over there but it isn’t a museum.”
Anyway, I wandered over to the railway area north of the station and did see a sign by an open gate that mentioned a museum, so walked through it. I never found an open museum (there is probably something in one of the buildings there) but what I did find enabled me to add to the photographs I had already taken. The NS and, I believe, other operators had some old locomotives in sidings there, out of sight of the passenger railway. There were some interesting old diesels that I recognised from former times. Two were quite clearly in current use and were coupled to a newly-converted track testing vehicle. Others looked as if they were just stored.
Two of the locomotives, one in the station yard and one in this enclosed area, were examples of British-built English Electric 350bhp 0-6-0 diesel shunters, familiar to British eyes and very much so in Holland as well until recently.
By now I was beginning to realise that I was probably trespassing on NS property and made a discreet retreat back to the station. While I was on my way there, another orange-liveried Alsthom B-B passed through on a long freight, but I wasn’t close enough to identify it let alone photograph it.
Later that day I was in a train arriving at Amsterdam Centraal when I saw and had to photograph another very old vehicle. This had to be done through the tinted glass window of the train as it passed! The vehicle was the driving trailer from one of the old Dutch-Swiss Trans-Europ Express diesel hydraulic sets that were introduced in 1957 as four-car sets with C-C diesel power cars. Hopefully, one day someone will come along and restore this historic set properly in its smart original livery of red-and-cream; and please, display it out of reach of the graffi ti ‘artists’!
I had not found a museum, but I was very happy to have found a lot more than I had expected!