Chief conductor Willem Bax (59) has been checking travelers’ train tickets for 35 years. He is one of the NS employees who devised this code in a working group. In practice, Bax notices that travelers buy a train ticket at a discount and then look for people on the train to travel with. “That doesn’t always work when we check. All excuses are then passed,” says the conductor. “For example, you hear: ‘He just got out’, ‘He is in the toilet’ or ‘He is delayed.’ I expect that discussion will become much less with this code.”
NS introduces a special code for a joint travel discount: ‘I have already heard all the excuses’
