The Hague - Leeuwarden: Slow Urbanism and High Speed Train connexions

Today I had to go to my native Leeuwarden for a family visit. By car I get there within 2 hours. By train it takes almost 3 hours! And I did go by train. So I had all the time to think about this problem.

Finally, after much thinking, I got to Leeuwarden!

Slow Urbanism promotes public transport within the city. In case of the Netherlands this also means public transport in between cities as we don't have one big city. We are a country with a network of small interconnected cities. The strength of cities is it's own attractiveness and it's connectivity to other attractive cities. The trainstation environments themself have become attractive places.

nowadays The Hague Central Station is in the middle of a growing green CBD

I am amazed that since 40 years the traveltime from The Hague to Leeuwarden didn't improve. By car it hugely improved. In the North they always complain they don't get any funding for improvement of the train connections. Long time there were plans for a magnet train going from Schiphol-Amsterdam to Groningen with possible extension to Hamburg.

old intercity or new intercity - travel time is almost the same nowadays

After many reports the politics didnt dare to use this new techniq on a traject to a not so dense area of Holland. But amazingly they also didn't choose for the High Speed conventional train. They choose to fix a missing link between Amsterdam and Zwolle, an west-east connection which has nothing to do with the needed South (Randstad Holland) -North (Groningen-Friesland, maybe Germany) line.

The proposed traintrack in red, the choosen track in orange

Currently we live in times of small availability of investmentfunds so big infra projects are not to be expected. The chance of the North seems to have passed away. Still the North wants to be connected better. So how to do that and why. Why is easy, both connected cities will have better imago, an important fact in these times of marketing and commercials. The rest will follow. Current insufficient passenger numbers should grow when the connection is attractive, comfortable, cheaper and faster than the car. Even commuters will live in the North and be able to work in the Randstad.

x2000 of Swedish railways run on existing tracks

How make it faster?
I think the current 250 km from The Hague/Rotterdam can be travelled within 1,5 hour instead of the current 2:45 hrs. By using a special High Speed train which can run on the current tracks and reducing the ridiculous amount of stops (6 times 10 min.) In Sweden they have the X2000 running 200 km/h. When we use this, plus maybe two stops (Utrecht-Zwolle) Leeuwarden will become much more attractive to go to by train instead of the current more attractve car.

x2000 running on existing tracks with off course some adjustments

An Expressetrain!
Maybe it will be an expensive train, so it cannot replace current schedules but be an Add-on. In the form of an Expresse train running tree times a day connecting respectively Leeuwarden/ Groningen to respectively Schiphol/ The Hague. Click the following youtube film and imagine you are within 1,5 hour in the attractive provincial capital of Groningen. You can hardly read your book because you're allready there!