Jon Searles' photos with the keyword: Intercity Express

After taking the Eurostar to Brussels, the next leg of the trip to Prague is from Brussels Midi to Koln Hbf, where there is the sleeper train, EC457 the "Phoenix," to Prague, which departs at 2228, and gets into Prague at 0925 the next day. In km/h, the Phoenix isn't necessarily slow (if I'm not mistaken, it's allowed to go 200), but the trip takes all night due to a 20-minute stop in Berlin Sudkreuz, and more importantly, the fact that it runs via Berlin at all. In this video, however, I'm still on the ICE, enjoying close to 250 km/h running.

Here was a view out the window at 247 Km/h.

As I said before, these trains are quite fast, but 247 Km/h, or 153.48 m.p.h., isn't even the original ICE speed limit from 1991, which was 250Km/h, or about 156 m.p.h. Although the Class 403 and 406 ICE's are rated for 330Km/h, and the Class 402 is rated for 280, 250 is what most of the high speed network is still rated for in Germany. In addition, a large number of ICE routes are over conventional lines where the speed limit is between about 160 and 200. This is really the weakness of the ICE services, not the trains, but the fact that not enough was invested in building dedicated high speed lines.

This was my train, a Class 406 (and possibly the first one I had ridden) that would take me to Bruxelles-Midi.

This is a Class 402 ICE. These were short-lived in production, having only been built between 1995 and 1997 for lower-traffic routes, and only 46 were built. Originally, they were only six-car sets, with a small passenger capacity even for that length, of 391. This is compared to 12 cars and 743 seats on the original 401 Class ICE, 441 for the 8-car Class 403, and 430 for the Class 406.

Koln Hbf sees a lot of ICE traffic. This appears to have been a Class 403 ICE, also called a Velaro. Built by Seimens from 1999 to (officially, at least) 2010, when it was superseded by the Class 407. In the interim, a multi-current version, the Class 406, was also produced. All of these trainsets have been very fast. They were perhaps the first ever trains designed to cruise at 330Km/h, or 205 m.p.h. On speed tests in 2006, a Class 406 achieved a top speed of 407.6 Km/h, or 250.8 m.p.h., which wasn't a world speed record for a train, but a world record for an unmodified production train. The original Class 403 set a speed record for the class of 368 Km/h, or 228.66 m.p.h., in 1999 (to the best of my knowledge, as it was on the original tests).