Dutch railway company NS does not stop at average of nine scheduled stations every day in order to prevent large-scale delays, junior transport minister Wilma Mansveld told parliament in a briefing on Tuesday.

NS trains stop at nearly 40,000 stations each day, which means that in .02 percentage points of cases a station is missed out, the minister said.

Mansveld said she would prefer the NS ‘to keep to the published schedule’, but ‘if it is really necessary, then missing out stations would be a last resort’, the Nos reports.

She does not want to insist the NS stops trains at all scheduled stations because ‘I would be forcing them to take other measures which could lead to an even greater nuisance for passengers’.

However, passengers must be kept fully informed if a station is being bypassed, she said.

The station which was missed out most since January this year is Arnhem Zuid with 376 trains that did not stop. It was followed by Else and Nijmegen-Lent (374) and Utrecht Overvecht (135).