Despite enjoying desirable efficiency and less reliance on domain expertise, existing neural methods for vehicle routing problems (VRPs) suffer from severe robustness issues — their performance significantly deteriorates on clean instances with crafted perturbations. To enhance robustness, we propose an ensemble-based Collaborative Neural Framework (CNF) w.r.t the defense of neural VRP methods, which is crucial yet underexplored in literature. Given a neural VRP method, we adversarially train multiple models in a collaborative manner to synergistically promote robustness against attacks, while boosting standard generalization on clean instances. A neural router is designed to adeptly distribute instances among models, enhancing overall load balancing and collaborative efficacy. Extensive experiments verify the effectiveness and versatility of CNF in defending against various attacks across different neural VRP methods. Notably, our approach also achieves impressive out-of-distribution generalization performance on real-world benchmark instances.