ntrain
Traveller
123 comments
Posted 8 years ago
NS is the main railway here in the Netherlands and is quite busy, since many, many years in protecting the ''safety'' of their staff and passengers by putting metro-type gates (we call them ''poortjes'') in now nearly all main stations. You need a chipcard (similar to a London Oyster or Paris Mobigo or so) to open these.
BUT there are many other ways to do so;
Since this year the COVER of your Interrail pass has a Aztec=square barcode on it which also opens gates, I can confirm this works this morning. In fact thus you can use that for at least the whole year, I guess.
NOT all gates-use those with a white hole on it and lay that code against it.
IF it does not work you should do this:
NOT walk with someone else through-this will start a nasty beep-beep, but mostly noone will pay any attention to that. Unless you are so dumb to do that under the eyes of some inspector. In fact we Dutch are quite used to that phenomenon of helpless tourists.
The never told, but held in secret advice of NS is to use the GREEN buttons and this will link you to a central call-center-explain your problem and they can open 1 gate 1 time for you-both to go in and out. Yes, they will speekee the eengleesh.
Oh-but as it seems 99,99% of IR-users only visit AMSterdam anyway-that central station is gated, but all gates are open-for several more years to come. Just walk through.
At some stations DO pay attention-they may have gates for NS and also some other operator, like f.e. the metro in Amsterdam-do NOT use the wrong gates, as this will cost you dearly.
