No trains for a week: this Rotterdam station suspends all services because of…pee?

Planning on taking a train to or from Rotterdam Blaak this week? Think again, because the station is closed for repairs. But not the repairs you might expect; this is… pee-related. 

Yup, excessive amounts of urine at one of Rotterdam’s main stations have damaged the rails up to the point where trains are unable to fit on the tracks.

Where’s all this pee coming from?

Good question. 

You see, in older trains, the toilets don’t have the same intricate pipe system that new trains have, which washes away all your troubles at the push of a button.

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Instead, when you flush the toilet in many of those trains, what happens is simply that a flap opens, and your business is disposed of. Right onto the tracks. Wherever you are. 

If you do this at a train station, it just… stays there. No rain or anything to flush it away or clean it up (other than people). 

Quite the cleanup job

This pee situation (or should we say “pee-tuation”?) seems to be especially problematic at Rotterdam Blaak. Why? Because some of the station’s sleepers, which are the supports that lie underneath the rails, are made of wood. 

Since wood is malleable, meaning it can slightly change size or shape without breaking, some sleepers have shrunk due to urine, “among other things”, as RTL Nieuws writes.

(We hope the “other things” are not what we think they are, but they might be. 💩)

The result? The trains don’t fit on the tracks anymore. 🚄

So for the next week, the wooden sleepers in the station will all be replaced with concrete ones, so that trains can resume running as intended.

Not a recent problem

You would think something like this would spark some sense of urgency. But no, this has been an issue since 2020, when it “became clear that some tracks at Blaak station were in urgent need of maintenance due to wear and tear”, as RTL Nieuws explains.

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In case your usual train route is diverted from Rotterdam Blaak station, now you know why. We hope you’re not too “pissed” off. 😉

Have you noticed (or smelled) this issue at the Rotterdam station? Tell us in the comments!