This busy route will be acquiring new trains… but you will have to wait until 2025 to ride them.

Industry magazine Rail Tech reports that a large fleet of trainsets has been ordered from manufacturer Alstom.

They are based on the Coradia design and are capable of running at 200 km/h (125 mph) along the Brussels-Antwerp-Rotterdam-Schiphol-Amsterdam corridor.

The trains are owned by NS (Dutch Rail) with SNCB (Belgian Rail) responsible for marketing.

It is about time because the current trains feature conventional loco-hauled stock which is 40 years old.

These run in conjunction with the much faster Thalys HS (high speed) trains along the route. But Thalys requires compulsory reservations along with higher fares.

Brussels-Amsterdam was supposed to receive an upgrade back in 2013 when a fleet of Italian trains entered service under the new Fyra banner.

(Readers wishing to know more about Fyra will find more information here.)

But the Fyra trains proved unreliable in service and were soon returned to the manufacturer in Italy. Later they entered domestic service with Trenitalia.

One of the shareholders in Fyra was the airline KLM which had intended to block space for its customers travelling to and from Schiphol.

Had Fyra succeeded one wonders whether or not KLM would still be operating that short Brussels-Amsterdam sector.

ns.nl, belgiantrain.be