An almost annual phenomenon
It was a tough week for motorists. King Winter once again wreaked havoc and caused a lot of winter misery for traffic. Driving through snow, we hadn’t had to do that in the Netherlands for a while. But how did that work in the past? We’ll show you here! No one had ever heard of winter tires or ‘all-seasons’.
Yes, in the past, we still had real winters. Just look, winter produces beautiful pictures in this Haarlem street (photo: North Holland archive)
But it also causes a lot of inconvenience. Because if your DKW is packed in with black ice (photo Drents archive), how do you get into it?
And if your Daffodil has turned into an ice sculpture (photo Drents archive), will it still drive?
First, chipping away at the windshield (photo Joost Evers, National Archive).
And where do you go then? You just had to be lucky that a road had been dug out between the snow mountains (photo from 1942, Waterlands Archive).
There were times when you could drive your car onto the ice in a harsh winter. With your Ford Zephyr over the Zuidlaardermeer (Lucy Overhoff, National Archive), for example.
Very romantic. At least it was more fun than slipping and sliding through Amsterdam in a taxi (photo Bert Verhoef, National Archive).
And if you didn’t have a car yourself? Then you’d let yourself be pulled on a sleigh behind a kind neighbor’s Opel Kapitän (photo The Utrecht Archive).
Or you put on your skates to help a stranded Golf out of trouble (photo National Archive). Pure winter fun, try finding that now!
