Qualla: Intercity Experimental

Intercity Experimental: Introduction

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MPW57, Public domain. On 1 May 1988, on a stretch of new railway near Gemünden am Main that had not yet opened to the public, a four-car German test train reached 406.9 kilometres per hour. It was the fastest anything had ever gone on steel wheels, and it settled a question that had been open in German transport policy for twenty years. The train was called the Intercity Experimental, later renamed ICE V, and it was not designed to carry anybody anywhere. It was designed to prove a point — and every Intercity Express running in Germany today descends from it.

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Image: MPW57 | Public domain

Intercity Experimental: A Question Asked in 1968

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Thomas Sinnig, CC BY-SA 3.0. The federal research ministry commissioned a study in 1968 on whether high-speed rail made technical and economic sense in Germany. The results came back in 1971 saying the railways needed to go faster, and in 1972 the ministry took the lead on developing the technology to do it....

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Image: Thomas Sinnig | CC BY-SA 3.0

Intercity Experimental: Named on the Day the Money Arrived

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit K. Jähne, CC BY-SA 2.5. The concept that survived was a train with two power cars and a rake of coaches between them, backed by the ministry through a notice in the federal register on 10 February 1981. Then it stalled, because the ministry could not fully secure industry's participation, and the Bundes...

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Image: K. Jähne | CC BY-SA 2.5

Intercity Experimental: Everyone Built a Piece of It

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Thomas Sinnig, CC BY-SA 3.0. The programme was spread across German industry in a way that looks less like procurement than like a national project. Development began in September 1983 under Bundesbahn leadership in Munich, with manufacturing starting before the year was out. Krupp, Henschel and Krauss-Maffe...

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Image: Thomas Sinnig | CC BY-SA 3.0

Intercity Experimental: 317, Then 407

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bigbug21, CC BY-SA 3.0. The train was delivered in 1985 and went public on 26 November that year with a run at 317 km/h, timed to the celebrations for 150 years of German railways. Not everything went smoothly. On 3 September 1986 at the Burgsinn depot on the Hannover-Würzburg line, a set of points was ...

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Image: Bigbug21 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Intercity Experimental: Where It Ended Up

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bigbug21, CC BY-SA 3.0. Deliveries of the ICE 1 power cars, now Class 401 and directly derived from the ICE V's, began in 1987 — before the record run that made the prototype famous. After that the experimental train was mostly used for materials evaluation, the unglamorous work of finding out what fati...

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Image: Bigbug21 | CC BY-SA 3.0