Waterbus Schedules 2026

Waterbus runs the fast passenger boats on the Nieuwe Maas and the Drechtsteden waterways, linking Rotterdam with Dordrecht and the towns along the way — and, most famously, with Kinderdijk and its UNESCO-listed windmills.

Where it stops

Nine destinations line the route: Rotterdam, Capelle aan den IJssel, Krimpen aan den IJssel, Ridderkerk, Alblasserdam, Hendrik-Ido-Ambacht, Papendrecht, Zwijndrecht and Dordrecht. Several sit on opposite banks of the same water, which is exactly why the boat beats the road here.

Faster than the road, and that is the point

These are scheduled commuter boats rather than excursions: on a corridor where road and rail bend around the rivers, the boat goes straight. Line and stop information, service notices and the timetable are published together.

Paying

OV-pay lets you check in and out with a bank card, alongside e-tickets bought in advance. Fares cover single and return journeys, a day card, season subscriptions and group rates.

Built for visitors too

The site is published in six languages — Dutch, English, German, French, Japanese and Chinese — which tells you how much of the traffic to Kinderdijk arrives from outside Europe. There is a Waterbus app and an onboard magazine, Ferry Tales.

Forty-one departures on every route, which is the whole design

Look at the frequency column and it is almost uniform: Dordrecht to Zwijndrecht, Papendrecht to Dordrecht, Zwijndrecht to Hooikade — 41 departures each, in both directions, on route after route. Crossings run five to nine minutes.

That uniformity is deliberate. A network where every link has the same frequency behaves like a grid rather than a set of routes: you do not check whether your particular crossing is well served, because they all are. Sailings run roughly 06:30 to 21:20 with three day patterns layered on top, so the weekday service is denser than the weekend one without any link disappearing entirely.