Actors unknown used the Dutch national railway’s own safety systems against it in a massive, coordinated nationwide act of sabotage, bringing trains to a standstill on Tuesday.
Police and domestic intelligence are investigating after saboteurs brought large sections of the nation’s railway network to a halt on Tuesday, leading to considerable knock-on effects on both roads and railways abroad, including delays to international trains.
There have been no trains at all across swathes of the northern and central Netherlands after objects were attached to the rails in at least 30 known locations. Remarkably, the national railway operator says that in some places where the obstacles had been cleared, new ones were quickly placed in the same location again once engineers and police had left the scene.
The nationwide coordinated sabotage campaign has used the railway’s own safety systems against it, with metal objects “deliberately placed” across the two tracks. Modern railways use electrical circuits between the two rails to detect where trains are and are not, the presence of a train’s wheels and axle spanning the two tracks closes the circuit and alerts the signalling system to its location.
By manually shorting the circuit, the saboteurs were able to trick the automatic system into turning the signals across the network red to prevent phantom trains from crashing into each other, which in turn forced the real trains to halt as well.
A railway spokesman said: “They were placed there deliberately… Because the pipes are lying on the track, so-called sectional disruptions occur. The computer system then receives a signal that the track is occupied at that location… We are finding them in multiple locations spread across the country”.
In a later update that increased the number of known sabotage locations from 27 to 30, the rail network added:
…it appears to be an intentional disruption of train traffic caused by human action. Who is responsible for this and what the motive is is not yet known.
A total of over 30 disruptions were reported today due to material on the tracks. Not all of them have been resolved yet; we are still working on clearing the disruptions.
Multiple reports were made at some locations. We removed materials found in the track, but later received another report of a malfunction at the same location.
In some locations, these conductive items were 1.5-meter metal pipes — just long enough to rest atop the two tracks, which, at standard gauge, stand four feet, eight and a half inches apart — and in others, ordinary car jump-start cables clipped onto the two rails accomplished the same job.
While in most cases this form of sabotage would be comparatively harmless to life compared to deliberately derailing trains, as it forces the railway to stop trains by triggering red light signals, in cases where the track is sabotaged and a train is already close, the obstruction would not be detected. Indeed, Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf reports that a train did hit a metal pole in at least one case this morning, although fortunately there were no injuries.
Police are investigating the sabotage and have made no public statement on any suspects. No groups have yet come forward to claim responsibility for bringing nearly an entire European nation’s railway network to a standstill, and some campaign groups — including Extinction Rebellion and a Farmers’ protest movement — have spoken out to deny any knowledge.
The Dutch AIVD (General Intelligence and Security Service) is assisting the investigation and says it is focusing on identifying who is behind the sabotage. The national counter-terrorism centre declined to comment. The fact that, in some locations, this short-circuiting of the railway’s safety systems has occurred multiple times in one day suggests the attack is essentially ongoing, although train services are beginning to resume across the Netherlands as of Tuesday afternoon.
Because of the nature of the sabotage, which introduced phantom trains to the network, in several locations, level crossings were automatically activated to protect drivers from approaching trains that didn’t exist, spreading the network chaos onto the roads too.
This was not the only disturbance to Dutch roads on Tuesday morning, as farmer groups protesting against extreme environmentalist laws being forced on the country by the European Union dumped burning bales of hay onto major roads to disrupt traffic.
The hay bale protest, along with a paint-throwing protest in The Hague, was intended to impact Tuesday’s Prinsjesdag, a Royal procession to the nation’s Parliament to open a new governing season, akin to the State Opening of Parliament in the United Kingdom.
Tuesday’s coordinated sabotage campaign in the Netherlands is just the latest in a series of such attacks in recent years, which in many cases are either claimed by or blamed on hard-left anarchists and environmental extremists. Just last Friday, potential sabotage was suspected after a train derailed in western France near Cléon, injuring dozens and critically injuring an 18-year-old woman.
As well as railway networks, climate extremists have targeted power infrastructure. The decentralised nature of both networks and the widespread disruption possible makes them apparently attractive targets for would-be extremists and left-wing terrorists, given that the widely spread infrastructure is difficult to closely watch, harden, or fortify.
In at least one case, European railways have been sabotaged by state actors, with Russia blamed for a bombing of a Polish railway in a “false flag” attack last year.
Germany’s power networks have also been repeatedly sabotaged by the hard left in recent months. Just last week, it is believed an extremist used dozens of homemade rockets to knock out high-voltage power substations to sabotage coal power plants nationwide, and Berlin’s power network is sometimes subjected to acts of arson with considerable knock-on effects. Summarising these attacks from previous reports:
Previous attacks include massive power outages that saw Berlin plunged into darkness for days at a time on two occasions. Hard left climate extremists claimed the sabotage, which saw high voltage power lines set on fire, causing the largest power outage in the cite since the Second World War.
50,000 homes were left without power in September 2025 after a hard-left group said it had burnt out a key power line, overwhelming backup systems as the cut lasted so long battery packs and generators became exhausted. Trams were left stranded on the roads, blocking major junctions and even basic systems like the emergency telephone numbers for the police and other emergency services ceased to function.
Local media said the attack was by “left-wing extremist attack with insider knowledge” on where exactly to set fires to cause maximum disruption.
Left-wing group “Some Anarchists” said ending the use of electricity altogether was their ultimate aim and that without it life would be full of “freedom without domination and exploitation. They stated: “Electricity is the primary source of energy that powers every machine and the ‘progress’ necessary to reproduce this current system”. The group was thought to be behind “dozens” of other such attacks.
The month before that , German railways experienced days of “massive” disruption as a ultra-anarchist set fire to cables rending a major line carrying intercity and international trains unusable.
As the first set of cable damage was repaired, a second fire was discovered nearby, again knocking the line out. Regional interior minister Herbert Reul said at a press conference: “Based on our authorities’ current assessment and understanding of this act of sabotage, it was left-wing extremists who are trying to bomb us back to pre-industrial times”.
A group calling themselves ‘Kommando’ claimed responsibility for the sabotage, and wrote in their manifesto:
The society we live in is in the process of devouring the entire planet. The mass conversion of natural ecosystems into dead products… [is] a core mechanism of the system… None of the proposed pseudo-solutions is capable of changing this problem. Not so-called renewable energies, nor communism, nor so-called green consumerism, nor any spiritual ‘transformations.’
The only solution is the complete dismantling of the technological-industrial system. We consider attacks on transportation, communications, and energy infrastructure, along with other forms of resistance, to be essential in this fight.
As reported by Breitbart News in 2022 there was another strikingly similar attack where “Backhaul communications cables concerned with the Germany Railway (Deutsche Bahn, DB) radio system, safety-critical equipment without which modern, tightly timetabled and high speed trains cannot safely operate, were “willfully and intentionally severed”.”
The perpetrators were said to have “very precise knowledge of the railway’s radio system” and two cables were cut simultaneously 340 miles apart. As expressed by a German Army General at the time of that attack, the purpose of such attacks are “not about an enemy army with soldiers and tanks attacking our country [but] pinpricks in the population that are intended to stir up uncertainty and shake confidence in our state” and “every substation, every power plant, every pipeline can be attacked”.
These “pinprick attacks” undermining public confidence in the everyday systems of Western life frequently target railways. Railway traffic was paralysed across France on the opening day of the Paris 2024 Olympics when suspected “ultra-left” activists who were said to have been “deliberate, very precise, extremely well-targeted”.
The following day, France was hit with a double-whammy when internet backbone cable networks were sabotaged in six locations nationwide simultaneously.
Cables supplying power to high-speed trains were sabotaged in in 2019 in Italy. As stated at the time, this attack appeared to coincide with a court ruling on a left-wing group said to have bombed a book shop.
In 2019, a radio transmitter was burnt in France. In 2020, 50,000 people lost internet access in greater Paris when cables were cut. This was said to be the culmination of a weeks-long campaign against information infrastructure.
In 2021, a series of attacks against telephone and internet services in France saw data company vehicles burnt, fibre optic cables cut, and a radio tower destroyed. Left-wingers took credit, saying: “it is not to protest against 5G in particular but in a broader context, fighting against the techno-world… We want to salute all the arsonists who are acting in the shadows at the moment and repeatedly beating this technological hell.”
In early 2022, the far-left was suspected over the sabotage of a power station and nine power lines over two nights. This left thousands of homes and a semiconductor factory without power. Days later, several French cities were left totally without internet after data cables in several locations were cut in the same night. The sabotage was done effectively enough, it was said the attackers would have to have “known the network”.