​TU student makes €14 travel card worth over €150

0 NS Dagkaart. From 8:00 to just after midnight, he hops from train to train, covering 1,033 kilometres in 16 hours, a journey that would cost €167.00 in separate tickets.

We caught up with Pratomo, an MSc student in Architecture, Urbanism and Building Sciences, and asked him how the whole adventure began. “So, I bought this dagkaart few months ago. At the time, I was sure that I would travel somewhere far with it. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen, some school related work kept cropping up. The card was only valid up to a point, and when that date started approaching, I started panicking. Not only would I be losing the money I spent on the card, but I had a big school project looming and couldn’t see myself using the card on the last weekend,” said Pratomo.

Initially he considered the selling the card, but he found that several people were already selling the same card, and at much cheaper rates. “And then bang, the idea just hit me. I could combine mobility and productivity at the same time. I woke up early one morning, took my fully charged laptop, and just left!”

He hadn’t planned the whole trip down to the wire, only that he wanted to go to all the ends of the country. Once aboard a train, he kept tracking travel options via 9292.nl. In the end, he couldn’t make it to Enschede and only went as far as Almelo on that route. Along the way, he recorded videos of various stations, and of himself on random trains.

Given that it was a weekend with a looming deadline, Pratomo’s friends thought he was crazy to step out but he said he actually managed to get a lot of work done. “In fact, the train is a good place to study when TU Delft library is full.”

It wasn’t all work and travel. Somewhere between Utrecht and Eindhoven he saw the best sunset he has ever seen. Besides stopping for quick snacks 4-5 times, he had lunch in Groningen and dinner in Maastricht. His next tip about trains: “It is the best place to be ‘outdoor’ during the winter without getting cold.”

After all those hours on the move, inertia took its time setting in. “For a while after getting home I felt like my body was still moving.”

The film has received some criticism though. Some people have called the project “boring’; or a “waste of time”. “It’s fun to hear good and bad comments. As I’ve said, I was very productive on the train. As for boring, for me boring and wasting time is when one stays at home and stares into their computer. I, on the other hand, had a very exciting day.”