I was in Frankfurt last month to attend a conference, since my wife had also tagged along with me, we decided to spend the weekend in Berlin. There were couple of things I was looking forward to my journey to Berlin;
- Ride on the ICE train.
- The new Berlin Hauptbahnof.
DB's Inter City Express or "ICE " high speed trains are among the best-known brands of Germany, that said, I decided to take the train to Berlin instead of flying. My only other experience on a high speed train was on Thallys from Paris to Brussels. We booked the tickets online two weeks in advance and were lucky enough to get the reduced price fare. I was hoping that I could get on the third generation ICE3 train which supposedly goes over a speed of 300km/hr (It takes less than an hour to travel a distance of 140miles from frankfurt to Cologne on ICE3) , but it turned out that Frankfurt-Berlin was operated by ICE2 trains which is slightly slower than ICE3, but ofcourse still way faster than the Amtraks we are used to.
We arrived at the Frankfurt Haupbahnof 30 mins before our scheduled departure. Since we had already reserved our seats, we knew which car to board and finding our seats was very painless. They even had our names printed above our seats. The train itself was very nice compared to Thallys. The seats were large with lots of legroom and looked like the business class seats of a transatlantic flight. The coolest part was the electronic tableau over the sliding glass doors which shows the actual speed of the train. When I looked at it on the way to the restroom it was showing 240 km/h. That’s probably the fastest speed I’ve ever traveled at, without leaving the ground.
The German country side had some breathtaking views. The train makes few stops on the way to Berlin including Wolfsburg. For all the VW fans outhere, the Wolfsburg station is right next to the Volkswagon factory and you can pretty much see the the entire factory, customer delivery center & VW museum buildings from the train.
It took slightly less than 4 hours to reach Berlin, we got off at the new spanking Berlin central station or the Hauptbahnhof. The entire building is made of glass, its huge and amazing to look at, it looked so delicate that I felt that the entire building could come crashing down if the glass shatters. If you ever get off at Berlin Hauptbanhof walk towards the center of the building and you could see trains moving in all three levels.It's a remarkable piece of design and engineering. It's also one of the biggest shopping centers in Berlin and pretty cool out there.
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| ICE Train |
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| One of the three levels |
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| Main Entrance |
In my opinion ICE trains are definitely much better than Thallys and I believe Thallys and French TGV operate similiar trains. Hopefully I can take the eurostar later this year and decide for myself which is the best train in Europe. My only advice if your are planning on taking ICE is to reserve your seats in advance.
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