A cable fire has disabled a railway section in the south of Rotterdam. Initially, the problem seemed to be a relatively quick fix, but its complexity only became clear in the following days. Rail freight is relatively untouched by virtue of the location of the damage. Still, had this happened elsewhere, the problem would have been much, much bigger.
The fire took place in a cable trough alongside track infrastructure during hot weather on 29 June. There are approximately 299 cables in the cable trough, explained infrastructure manager ProRail. A large portion of these are damaged over a length of twenty metres.
Dutch rail freight can and perhaps should consider itself lucky with the location of the fire. If it had happened only a couple of kilometres south, it could have cut off the entire Rotterdam port. The rail freight sector is used to disruptions by now, so that scenario would have been undesired but manageable — if limited in time.
Hypothetical scenarios elsewhere
That’s a big ‘if’. The ongoing cable repairs have proven to be so complex that the works are still ongoing. No trains have operated from Rotterdam central station towards the south for a week already.
The good news is that this route, which curves north from the port railway, is relatively unimportant to freight. The fire has only disrupted freight trains to Amsterdam and the north of the Netherlands, a business that has been in decline due to the high track access charges, explains the Dutch rail freight association RailGood to RailFreight.com.
“I don’t want to think about such an accident taking place between Tilburg and Breda, or Boxtel and Eindhoven”, says RailGood head Hans-Willem Vroon. Both of those locations are key for rail freight operations.
The Dutch infrastructure manager ProRail appeals to bad luck. It could not have foreseen or done much about it. Vroon disagrees with that self-assessment and presents four points:
- A lack of redundancy and too many cables bundled together
- No subsystem separation: all 4 tracks impacted, rather than just one or two
- ProRail failed to detect the issue in a timely manner and shut it down
- Unsatisfactory speed of function recovery
“ProRail is not well set up for business continuity and resilience”, adds Vroon. “The Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management has become so incompetent that, as with ProRail’s snow collapse in January 2026, it dismisses this as the new normal.”
