Railways in the Netherlands: A Brief History, 1834-1994 (review)

Nowadays the Dutch railway system is one of the best in Europe. Its passengers enjoy regular, generally reliable, and modestly priced service over a dense network connecting all major and many minor centers of population in the Netherlands and providing good—and in some cases, such as the new high-speed link to Brussels and Paris, excellent—connections with the rest of continental Europe. But this success has been bought at a price: high levels of capital investment by the state in the aftermath of the destruction wrought by World War II, and continuing subsidies to meet the more-or-less inevitable shortfall between operating costs and revenue. Thus, like many other large-scale technological systems providing public services, the railways are firmly wrapped into the realm of politics: privatization in some form now threatens.

The balance between state and private involvement was always an issue in the Netherlands, as Augustus Veenendaal's first-ever English-language survey of the history of the network makes clear. An expanded version of the author's De Ijzeren Weg in een Land vol Water (rev. ed., 1998), it offers a highly readable narrative, comprehensive and profusely illustrated, outlining the railways' evolution from their modest beginnings in the 1830s to the dawn of the era of privatization.

Early railway development was largely driven by the Dutch state: the politics of nationalism loomed large as the Netherlands sought to establish its borders with the rebellious Belgians. Construction and operation of the major lines was for many decades shared between the state railway and the privately owned Holland Company; merger into a single Nederlandsche Spoorwegen came voluntarily, in 1917. Water features heavily in the story, alongside the state. The ready availability of cheap waterborne transport for freight meant that Dutch railways faced stiff opposition from vested interests when they were first proposed, and the railways never gained anything like a monopoly. Large lakes and substantial watercourses were also significant obstacles to railway construction.

As a narrative history of Dutch railways that places the development of the network in the context of national politics, this is an excellent introduction. It also provides a concise account of the railways' business performance in the face of competition from water and, increasingly, road transport; equally welcome is the considerable space given over to railway workers. But it is not a volume that will excite the historian of technology looking for new theoretical insights or a detailed and nuanced analysis of the social shaping of railway technologies. Technical matters—at least in the sense of the development of infrastructure and rolling stock—are largely bundled into separate chapters, or into discrete sections within chapters that provide an overview of wider events. This does not encourage the kind of mutual embeddedness of technology and culture sought by readers of this journal: indeed, chapter titles such as "The Glory Days of the Steam Locomotive" may suggest—quite wrongly, as it happens—that Veenendaal has nothing to say to an audience beyond the rail fans who will no doubt make up part of the readership.

Some perseverance may therefore be required from historians of technology who are not particularly interested in Dutch railways per se. It will be modestly rewarded. Technology transfer, for example, was a persistent theme with nineteenth-century Dutch railways. Early lines, built by engineers who had moved in British engineering circles, were dominated by British ideas (not all of them particularly successful) in matters such as the design and construction of roadbed and track, and locomotives were imported from England; later, other countries, notably Germany, gained a greater prominence. Not surprisingly, technical standards and operating practices were heavily influenced by those in the countries to which the Dutch system connected.

Despite the modest size of the network, the history of Dutch railways offers much of interest to the historian of...