I was looking at the locations of the railway sabotage incidents in the Netherlands, and I have to admit that some of them surprised me.
Without going into too much detail, what I find somewhat surprising is that the locations do not seem to involve the more heavily used southern railway corridors, including routes used for international connections, by people entering the Netherlands from other countries, or by visitors traveling to and in the main destinations in the Netherlands.
Some of the locations therefore seem rather unusual to me. It is not entirely clear why these particular parts of the Netherlands appear to have been targeted, as they seem to me to be much more closely associated with domestic rail traffic.
Major routes around Eindhoven, Breda, Tilburg and South Holland, as well as the Eindhoven–Amsterdam corridor and several other important connections, do not appear to have been affected. I would think that even more remote sections of these lines could potentially have been vulnerable.
This is particularly interesting when considering international movement into the Netherlands. People travelling from the eastern parts of Europe via Germany generally enter the country through its southern and eastern approaches when heading towards South Holland or further north towards Amsterdam. People travelling from other parts of the Benelux, as well as from France and southern Europe, also tend to use the southern parts of the Dutch railway network, especially when traveling to major destinations such as South Holland, Amsterdam or Utrecht.
The international movement is therefore concentrated largely along routes that do not appear to have been affected. These include connections between Eindhoven and South Holland, South Holland itself, the coastal area, Amsterdam and other major destinations. There are similar international movements on routes connecting the Netherlands with the other Benelux countries, France and the United Kingdom.
ProRail identifies Amsterdam–Eindhoven, Breda–Eindhoven, Schiphol–Utrecht–Nijmegen and Rijswijk–Rotterdam, among others, as major high-frequency passenger corridors. At the same time, Amsterdam, Schiphol, Rotterdam and Breda are important nodes in international rail transport. Eurostar, for example, runs from Amsterdam via Schiphol and Rotterdam to Belgium, with international services continuing from there towards France and the UK.
And if I leave these busier southern routes aside, Venlo is also quite an important point in this analysis. It is not simply a “German direction”, but an important eastern gateway between the Dutch railway network and the Düsseldorf/Mönchengladbach area.
Amsterdam–Venlo–Düsseldorf is an established international rail connection. NS International lists it as an alternative route between Amsterdam, Venlo, Düsseldorf and Frankfurt. From Venlo, regional trains continue directly to Mönchengladbach, Düsseldorf and Hamm.
There is also a rail connection between Rotterdam and Düsseldorf, meaning that South Holland is connected to Düsseldorf as well.
At the same time, there is a direct ICE service from Amsterdam to Düsseldorf via Utrecht and Arnhem, so Düsseldorf is connected to the Netherlands through more than one corridor.
I may be missing something in my reasoning, and I am not claiming that this analysis is necessarily correct. But if the objective was to cause as much disruption as possible to the Dutch railway network, my question would be why these busiest and most internationally relevant corridors were largely left untouched, while the infrastructure that was targeted appears, at least to me, to be more closely associated with a specific domestic rail traffic.
In other words, if the intention really was “to cause as much disruption as possible to the Dutch railway network”, it seems to me that this could be true especially for a particular part of the Netherlands, rather than for the Dutch railway network as a whole.
