High-speed route
ICE
Berlin → Cologne · Germany
ICE in pictures
Photographs by their authors, hosted on Wikimedia Commons · tap through for the licence
- Distance
- 573 km
- Fastest time
- 4 h 8 min
- Average speed
- 139 km/h
- Top speed
- 250 km/h
- Operator
- DB Fernverkehr
- Train
- ICE 4 · Class 412
- Countries
- Germany
- In service since
- 1998
- Runs
- hourly
Figures are published values, not live data · corrections log
Races the length of the North German Plain; the dead-straight Hanover–Berlin racetrack, partly laid on old border land, lets ICE 4 sets hold 250 km/h.
The capital’s window on the west opened properly in 1998, when the Hannover–Berlin high-speed line finished reunification’s first great rail project. ICEs cross the Elbe flats and Mittelland canal country, pause at Wolfsburg beneath Volkswagen’s chimney quartet, then run the old Prussian trunk through Westphalia (Bielefeld, Hamm, the Ruhr’s city chain) before the Rhine bends the line into Cologne beneath the cathedral. Four hours that read as a compressed economic history of Germany.
How this line was checked
- Line drawn from OpenStreetMap relation 9626408 — the same nodes OpenStreetMap holds for this railway, thinned to within under 25 m of them
- Checked against OpenStreetMap: the whole line lies on real track, a median 5 m from it
- The operator publishes this line's timetable: Deutsche Bahn — a place to look it up, not a check of our drawing
- Wikipedia has an article for this line
Along the way
- Elbe marshes and canal country
- Wolfsburg’s Autostadt chimneys
- Porta Westfalica gap
- Ruhr conurbation city chain
- Rhine approach to the Dom
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More train routes in Germany.
Planning this trip? Journey time & direct trains: Berlin → Cologne · Cologne → Berlin.