With a top speed of 300km/hour the high speed trains are super-fast, comfortable, reliable, safe and environmentally-friendly, bringing passengers to the city centres. The high level of comfort, combined with the short travelling times, makes travelling with the HSL like flying without wings. In short: especially for medium-range travel, the HSL will be serious competition for cars and aeroplanes. Expectations are that part of the (business) travellers will leave their car in the parking lot and take the train instead. This will relieve the Dutch motorways to an extent. In this way, the HSL improves the accessibility of the Netherlands and the Randstad both directly and indirectly.

In the Netherlands, the international and domestic high speed trains will stop at the stations Amsterdam Central, Schiphol, and Rotterdam Central. Additionally a rapid connection will operate between The Hague, Breda, Antwerp and Brussels.

Economic impulse
European regions are competing with each other to attract business activity. Infrastructure, labour market and business climate are the principal distinguishing factors in this respect. The combination of a good connection to Europe and good domestic infrastructure does not only consolidate the international competitive position of the Randstad and ultimately of the entire country. Read more >>

The government is the owner of the HSL. The HSL Project Organization is building the line and transfers the responsibility for and management of the infrastructure to ProRail. The government has contracted Infraspeed to provide the maintenance for a 25-year period. The group that will be transporting passengers on the HSL in the Netherlands is called High Speed Alliance (HSA). This is a joint venture of Royal Dutch Airlines (KLM) and Dutch Railways (NS). HSA will pay the government an annual fee for this right of use.

For the construction of the HSL, the expected number of high speed train passengers was assumed to be 14 million a year, but for 2010, HSA now expects 16 to 17 million domestic passengers and 7 million international passengers annually.