Spoorwegen in Nederland van 1834 tot Nu (review)

During a presentation at the Netherlands Railways (NS), Guus Veenendaal expressed astonishment at the fact that the NS had not commissioned a full-blown railway history on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of Dutch rail transport. A collection of essays and some other work had been published at the NS’s behest, but a “definitive” railway history had not appeared since 1939. NS took the hint and hired Veenendaal to fill the void. Six years later, in 2004, the first edition of Spoorwegen in Nederland van 1834 tot Nu (Railways in the Netherlands from 1834 to Now) saw the light of day.

This magisterial, richly illustrated, hardcover book of more than 600 pages clearly bears the mark of corporate sponsorship. It is not that Veenendaal’s account paints too rosy a picture. Far from it. Dark episodes, like the NS’s role in the deportation of Dutch Jews in World War II, or chronic weaknesses, like the never-ending sacrifice of customer service to cost control, get equal time with the sunny side of railway history like electrification and trains to the beach. Nonetheless, corporate sponsorship in this case gave Veenendaal the resources (salary, time, and unlimited access to the huge and well-ordered NS archives) necessary to undertake a hugely optimistic project. As the title suggests, the aim is nothing less than a comprehensive history of Dutch railways from their inception in 1834 to the present.

The scale of the project is a mixed blessing. In the course of four sections titled “Growth,” “Flowering,” “Decline,” and “Resurrection,” Veenendaal explores the long and checkered history of Dutch railways, from the boardrooms to the switchyards, from Vlissingen to Roodeschool, and from Kerkrade to Den Helder. Along the way we are treated to the rich histories of locomotives and brake systems, the shifting sands of international and European railway policy, station architecture, troubled labor relations, public judgments on railway cars and timetables, the contradictory relationship of railway companies to the Dutch state, and, not least, the special problems of railways in war and in a country full of water.

The plethora of topics, however, often gets in the way of a serious investigation of historical issues and questions. The apparent need to cater to the antiquarian interests of railway buffs by providing detailed descriptions of rolling stock and stations particularly tried this reviewer’s patience. For all its rich information, the book seems at times like an uneasy compromise between a serious historical study and a boy’s picture-book of locomotives and railway stations.

Given the paradoxes of corporate-sponsored historiography, it is to Veenendaal’s credit that he carries it off as well as he does. The book’s first edition was indeed rightly received as a many-faceted, well-written, and erudite overview of Dutch railway history from 1834 to now. There was, however, some disappointment about the “now.” Reviewers complained, and the author agreed, that the most recent developments had gotten short shrift. By 2004 this had become troublesome because of EU-inspired changes in Dutch transportation policy and the manifold problems that had accompanied privatization of the NS around the turn of the century. In the present second edition, these shortcomings have been addressed and we are now up to date as of 2008. But even in the new addendum, exhaustiveness battles with insight in a text that tries to do too much at once.

For foreign scholars who happen to read Dutch, the book could be disappointing because in the end it fails to come through on the thing of paramount interest: identifying the distinguishing characteristics of Dutch railways as a function of the peculiar location, geography, and institutional history of the Netherlands. In this connection there are several rich veins exposed in Veenendaal’s book that simply beg for more thoroughgoing accounts. First, the peculiar history of entrepreneurialism, (state) ownership, and state regulation of Dutch railways. Second, the influence of Dutch geography (flat, water-ridden, urbanized, compact, mild climate) on...