As in olde times - Train spotters

No dispute: they got trains on the brain (Photo: Hans Stakelbeek/FMAX)

The student members of Dispuut Verkeer (transport, infrastructure and logistics study association) are crazy about everything to do with trains, cars and boats. No wonder then that the chairman of the board’s gavel is made of two pieces of train track. 
This study association traditionally goes over the top when celebrating its anniversaries, pulling off some spectacular stunt or other. For their last five-year anniversary celebrations, they laid down railroad ties and tram rails on the Mekelweg and held a tram-pulling competition, says the association’s chairman, Arnold Meijer. “At the time there was no national tram-pulling championship - we were the first.”
For the association’s first anniversary, some twenty years ago, an antique steam train chugged up and down the Mekelweg. “The tracks ran from the civil engineering faculty building to the aula. Another time we arranged for the park shuttle - a computer-controlled bus, which is more like a horizontal elevator, that comes to your bus stop upon request - to ride down the Mekelweg. That shuttle is now used at Rotterdam’s Kralingse Zoom metro station, but back then it was still a prototype.”
When the association celebrates its next anniversary, in May 2010, they plan to outdo all the previous stunts. The association’s committee is currently thinking of ideas. “The crazier the idea the better. Ideally we want to do something in the air, but that’s up to the anniversary planning committee. I’ve heard some rumours of plans and they all sound spectacular.” But Meijer remains tight-lipped: “Because otherwise another study association might steal our idea. I can say that the stunt will have something to do with civil engineering and something with transport engineering.”