Why treintoerist?

To me, train travel is pure relaxation. You get on, lean back and watch the landscape glide by while someone else does the driving. I wish that feeling on many more people, and that is why this site exists.

The Netherlands has something beautiful to offer at almost every destination. A museum, a walk, a zoo or a view you did not expect. Treintoerist helps you discover those places, especially the ones just off the beaten track.

Many people here already have a student travel card or an off-peak subscription. With those you travel outside rush hour at no extra cost, so a day out is easily arranged. It would be great if those cards left the drawer a bit more often, and I hope this site gives that a nudge.

Besides that, this is above all a learning project for me. I build the site with AI as an assistant. Whether you are for or against AI, it is not going away and there is a future in it, so I would rather learn to work with it now than miss the boat later. There are good sides and less good sides, and those are exactly what I am discovering along the way. One thing I already know: for real work you never blindly put AI straight into a production environment.

Along the way I am learning to deploy the site automatically with Codeberg Actions, and discovering how to pull data from external APIs, such as station information from NS and the activities from OpenStreetMap. Getting better at that is at least as much fun as the end result.

It is voluntary and non-commercial. No ads and no business model, purely for fun and because I enjoy building it.