From Tuesday 24 September the Belgian rail company NMBS will be providing quiet zones on many of its intercity (IC) services. A pilot project that was launched at the beginning of last year, has been judged to have been a great success and NMBS has now decided to roll out the quiet zone scheme more widely. During the coming months all IC services will have one or more carriages that include a quiet zone. The idea is by next summer to give a least 65% of passengers the opportunity to enjoy a train journey without having to listen to other people’s telephone conversation, music or noise from games on their mobile phones.
At the end of last year NMBS launched a pilot project with quiet zones on trains between Eupen (Liège Province) and Ostend (West Flanders) and between Brussels and Luxembourg. The reaction from passengers has been positive and more than half that took part in a NMBS survey say that they take the train more often since the quite zones were introduced.
Soon the quite zone scheme will be extended to services between Antwerp and Charleroi (Hainaut). Kortrijk (West Flanders) and Schaarbeek (Brussels) Genk (Limburg) and Blankenberge (West Flanders) and Brussels and Namur.
Three golden rules
Each double deck train will have at least 1 quiet zone. These are always on the bottom deck. Stickers indicate which areas are quiet zones.
Passengers in the quiet zones are requested to not talk loudly to other passengers, to be discrete when making a telephone call, to put their phone on "silent" and if they are listening to music on their headphones to keep the volume down.
NMBS is keen to stress that those wishing to sit in the quite zones are able to do so without having to pay extra.