If you get lucky you can find very attractive tickets from AMS to LCY. Taking advantage of code-sharing can help: my flights last January were KLM tickets for a VLM flight using an Air France City Jet plane.

I know, the new/future locomotives look butt-ugly…

http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bestand:Ansaldo_Breda_V250.JPG

The wikipedia page reports a plan (from 2007) to check if a eurostar route, calling at antwerpen, rotterdam, and amsterdam, can be created via the HSL-Zuid/HSL4 line, and a bit in between at slower speed. Here’s hoping they’ll do just that.

It looks like certain parts (antwerp – brussels, amsterdam – hoofddorp, and a bit around breda) will require slowdown, but on the whole, a train that only calls at amsterdam, ams airport, rotterdam, antwerp, and brussels, driving 300kmh on half the track, should cut off almost 2 hours (if it includes connecting nicely for the eurostar).

One explanation for yesterday’s cancellations of the Amsterdam-Brussels train might be that they’re using those same trains on the HSL between Amsterdam and Rotterdam, but I doubt NS Hispeed would be dumb enough not to arrange other trains for the Amsterdam-Brussels line.

@Cristiano: It is economically uninteresting to have a fast and reliable connection between the capitals of two neighboring countries one of which contains the seat of government of Europe?

There are a lot of caveats there, certainly. To wit:

– I don’t believe it. I can’t find any research on this, however. Any idea where I could look?

– As usual in environmental discussions held in the past 3 years, this focus on CO2 is ridiculous. If we solved the entire CO2 problem tomorrow, the environmental issue would not be solved. Even global warming/climate change (a subset of environmental) wouldn’t be solved. It’s a tiny subset of a small subset of the environmental problem.

– It presumes coal and gas fired electricity, and not e.g. nuclear which is mostly what the french TGVs run on. Rabid treehuggers won’t like this, but as long as there are no reasonable alternatives, nuclear is a pretty good environmental option. Of course, on the trajectory from AMS to London, there’s not much nuclear power to be had, nor any other environmentally low-profile energy, such as water or geothermal, so it’s a valid assumption.

– Planes are hard to scale, environmentally. Even if you manage to put a nuclear powerdrive on a plane (security, anyone?), there’s no obvious way that I know of that can run a large passenger jet on electricity alone. This is of course quite different with trains. We’d have to go back to prop planes. Is there a way to replace the majority of energy use on a _jet_ plane with electricity?

– AMS London is a rather unique proposition, in that the train takes a sizable detour compared to the plane.

It would be interesting to see some numbers on the environmental impact of a city hop flight vs. a high speed train ride.

On a related note: This week, the major dutch train transport provider (NS) has started a pilot project to run high speed train traffic from Amsterdam straight to Rotterdam. Will start at 160kmh, and are planning to extend to 300kmh (though until that train tunnel gets built in Delft, it’ll have to slow down near The Hague and enter rotterdam at the original 160kmh – that narrow bridge in Delft is not up to spec and never will be).

If for once the NS can get their ass in gear, and cooperate with the belgian train system, they may just at some point start offering tickets to london that involve a 300kmh ride from Ams or Rotterdam straight to brussels, with priority so that they rarely get delayed, and scheduled to arrive exactly 30 minutes prior to the eurostar’s departure.

What boggles my mind is the competitive FAIL of the train services here. There is clearly no issue of a lack of supply on the train side; they can easily run more trains if the demand exists to fill them. The price and capacity of the train amslondon connection is what it is today primarily due to the stupidity of this connection and the lack of competitiveness compared to easyjet/ryanair’s flight services.

Including the trip from stansted or luton to the heart of london, a properly organized fast train service that connects to brussel with a 30 minute window, or, better yet, passport control at amsterdam station and a train that goes straight to london without a transfer, can be faster than the flight. That should net about 3x the interest in the train journey overnight. I can’t see what, other than bureaucratic stupidity, is holding the train services back from making this happen.

I doubt they can ever tackle the pure speed market; it’s kind of hard to beat the RotterdamLondon City airport service VLM offers, but those services that land in london city are invariably expensive. However, being competitive (speedwise, and pricewise) with just about every other flight seems simple, and they’d win that fight based on the convenience of the train vs. the constant interruptions of the full journey by air (including travel to the inner city).