Description

The risk that numerous major planned interruptions to the service, faltering investments and political pressure on ProRail lead to a shortage of rail infrastructure capacity and insufficient improvement in the quality, so that NS cannot achieve its growth goals and operational improvements to the extent it wishes.

Explanation

When implementing its scheduled services, NS is dependent on sufficiently reliable rail infrastructure. A number of factors can put additional pressure on the infrastructure capacity and infrastructure quality, both now and in the future. The number of passenger-kilometres will increase further. Safety requirements and environmental requirements are increasing, including for shunting yards. There were a lot of planned interruptions in 2017 due to engineering work; this will be the case in the next few years too. The train frequency on a number of routes will increase in 2018. Finally, NS has ambitious growth plans.

Measures

In 2017, ProRail and NS followed an intensive preparation programme to increase the frequency of train services on a number of routes. This higher frequency makes greater demands on the organisation making adjustments in the event of disruptions. NS and ProRail have therefore drawn up a number of scenarios beforehand and defined adjustment tools to make sure that train services will continue to run as well as possible during disruptions. Gaming and supply chain simulations are used for this. The operational departments at NS and ProRail also performed tests and trained extensively.

An integral asset plan will be drawn up, in which the scheduled service design is combined with equipment, staff and infrastructure for the short and long term. This ensures more integral control towards ProRail regarding the need for infrastructure in the long term. Based on NS's fleet planning, various future scenarios will be developed and assessed, after which they will be shared proactively with the Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management and ProRail.

Risk control trend

Although control has improved in 2017, it may worsen. Possible reasons for this are the faltering pace of investments, increased safety requirements and environmental requirements, changes in the cooperation with ProRail as a result of the changed control mechanism, and planned interruptions due to the large amount of engineering work on the track.

Residual risk

High. The current risk profile does not yet match the desired risk profile.