A unique metro station right on the beach has opened in the Netherlands

The Rotterdam RET metro made its first trip to the new station on Hoek van Holland beach on Friday. The station had been finished for a some time, but setbacks meant services could not start until now. This was reported by Railway Supply magazine with reference to RailTech.

Previously, the Hoekse lijn was a railway connection between Rotterdam and the seaside town in the South Holland municipality of Rotterdam. In recent years it has been converted into a metro line.

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Work on the line, which began in 2017, soon turned into an uphill battle, as the years have seen mostly delays, problems and cost overruns. Additional costs were running into the tens of millions. In 2018, the publication of a critical report on delays and millions of euros shortfall led to the resignation of a local official. On Friday, at the opening of the station, the head of the RET operator said: “All the inconvenience for passengers is over now, let the summer come!”.

The metro station is indeed unique, being just forty metres from the beach. When designing the station the climate was taken into account and special measures were taken to protect it from the sand, wind and salt from the sea water.

There are several other metro stations that can claim to be the closest metro station to the beach. In Spain, for example, the Barceloneta metro station in Barcelona is about 600 metres in a straight line from the sea. The Stillwell Ave station in Coney Island is about 500 metres from the actual beach. The closest contender is New York’s Ocean Pkwy station – 170 metres from the beach.

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