News below sea level

Paul Kraaijer worked for many years for the animal rights groups ADC but secretly reported the group’s activities to the AIVD. Meanwhile, a recent survey found that the vast majority of Dutch police officers do not support the government’s plans to use 500 officers nationwide to specifically investigate cases of animal welfare abuses, instead of more serious crimes like rape, robbery and child abuse. 

Many MPs of the PvdA (Labour Party) rejected calls for a parliamentary decree tabled by the Animal Rights Party to outlaw the ritual slaughter of animals, a common practice among Dutch Muslims and Jews as part of their religious rituals. Many Muslims and Jews support the PvdA, and the PvdA’s current leader, Job Cohen, is also Jewish.

The government has decided to cancel a 2.7 million euros subsidy for Stivoro, a Dutch anti-smoking lobby group. Health Minister, Edith Schippers, said Stivor’s campaigns were ineffective, but the group’s supporters shot back saying the minister was merely supporting tobacco company lobbies, as the government also recently refused to raise taxes on cigarettes and scrapped a ban on smoking in bars and pubs.  

Aegon, a Dutch insurance and pensions group, has fully repaid the 3 billion euros it borrowed from the Dutch government at the height of the global financial crisis, with the final repayment also including an additional 1.1 billion euros in interest and early repayment fines. Earlier, ING bank also repaid the government some 2 billion euros in interest and fines as part of the bailout package the banking group received from the government. The Dutch government now wants Dutch banks and pension funds to extend low-interest rate loans to Greece as part to the EU-backed bailout scheme for that debt-ridden country. 

Elsewhere, some 30,000 young Christians from all over the Netherlands congregated in Arnhem earlier this month to celebrate evangelical ‘Youth Day’. The special guest at this event was Anne van der Bijl, an 83-year-old Dutch woman who during the Cold War routinely smuggled Bibles into communist countries. Meanwhile, in Amsterdam, hundreds of gays, lesbians and transvestites marched in the Amsterdam as part of the first ever European ‘Slut Walk’, an event that started in Canada after a policeman publicly stated that ‘women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimised’. The Amsterdam event was staged to promote tolerance. Rotterdam erected a public statue in honor of its native son, Rigardus Rijnhout, the tallest Dutchman ever. The statue is as tall as Rijnhout was: 2.37 metres. 

The organizers of the Pinkpop music festival have come in for criticism for charging increased VAT rates on tickets, having raised the charge from 6 to 19 percent. The organizers were also heavily criticized for paying the band Coldplay 1.3 million euros to perform for 85 minutes at the festival. 200,000 people attended the festival. And finally, super smart child prodigy, Erik van der Boom, who is just 13 years old, passed his secondary school exams and will now study at TU Delft.

Although still technically the summer, it has felt like autumn in the Netherlands these past weeks, thanks largely to the strong winds, which also create problematic side-effects for trains. The wind causes leaves to fall from the trees and onto the railway tracks, and this can lead to train delays or even cancellations. 2002 was a particularly bad year, with the rails remaining slippery for weeks on end. For his PhD, Oscar Arias-Cuevas (railway engineering group, faculty of Civil Engineering and Geosciences) researched four ways of ending this leafy misery for travelers, the NS and Prorail. He investigated the techniques involved with friction modifiers, sand, magnetic brakes usage, and a traction control system.

“Leaf layers stick to rails like chewing gum to the floor”, says Arias-Cuevas, who is from Spain. “When a wheel rolls over the rail, there is steel to steel contact with sufficient friction for accelerating and braking. When there are leaves between the wheel and the rail, there is no longer direct steel to steel contact. When a train accelerates, it sooner gets to the point when there’s more power than friction, and because of this the wheels slip. You could compare this to driving a car on ice. You can accelerate a little, but when you accelerate a lot the car’s wheels slip. In the Netherlands there are a lot of trains running, so to make full use of the capacity and also to be on time, today’s trains need to brake later and accelerate harder. When there are leaves involved, this is particularly difficult.”

Arias-Cuevas concluded that sand is a very useful tool for improving the adhesion and grip on the rails: “The sand causes a higher friction between the wheels and the rails. When the sand is being applied to the rails, it can also remove some of the leaves.” All locomotives have a sanding system: a deposit, like a car’s gas tank, for sand is located near the locomotives’ wheels. The sand flows through a pipe and is blown between the wheel and rail. “It’s a very useful method”, Arias-Cuevas concludes, “because the sand increases the friction level. However, in the Netherlands only locomotives have this system – the self-propelled trains do not – but for optimal results more trains should have this system. In the United Kingdom they use this method effectively also on self-propelled trains. It could be quite expensive for the NS to invest in this method.”

Arias-Cuevas only investigated the techniques available for putting an end to slippery tracks; he did not focus on how much the methods cost and what their profits are, although his research could be used to make such calculations.
A friction modifier containing sand is also an interesting option capable of producing great results, according to Arias-Cuevas’ research. Such modifiers are put on the rails by a train, and they stick on the rails longer than just sand alone, but this can also be more expensive. Arias-Cuevas also looked into a traction system that can calculate how hard a train could accelerate without slipping. The final system he researched was the use of a magnetic track brake, as used on the NS’s double-decker trains. This system uses brake shoes that are placed on the rails and could also be used to clean the leaves off the rails, although this could cause some damage to the brakes and rails. Arias-Cuevas notes that some of these systems could also be combined: “Sand and optimal traction control could be used together. To make a final judgment on the optimal solution, a costs-benefit analysis should be conducted. Hopefully my research will help end the damage done when leaves are on the rails.”