At first, the ICE branding meant a specific type of train seprate from the traditional Intercity brand name. Now practically every former IC train in Germany is branded ICE even though many of them don't even go above 200km/h. Why does DB feel the need to call every major Intercity train in Germany ICE branding?
ICE is a
comfort category, not a speed category, the same as EuroCity, InterCity, D-Zug etc.
The main features which differentiate it from IC are:
- On Board restaurant with at seat service
- Wifi(IC2 has this but IC1 mostly didn't)
- More Generous legroom
It is only railway enthusiasts that get hung up about the top speed of traction(and the in the case of the ICE-L, whether the power unit is permanently coupled to the train or not).
They can do it, but they don’t have the infrastructure to do so most of the time. Germany is awful at building high speed railways. In my opinion it only really makes sense for the ICE 3neo family to be considered ICE as 300km/h is the equivalent of what most TGVs can do. The ICE train naming convention makes no sense too. The ICE4 is not a successor to the ICE3, rather it’s a successor to the IC1 loco hauled trains!
This quote perfectly illustrates this obsession. According to Transilien, only the approved top speed of the traction matters, even if it never reaches it because there's only one short strectch of track in the country where it could. From a passenger perspective this makes no sense at all. The passenger should trust the operator to provide traction appropriate for the speeds feasible on the given route and stopping pattern.
Making direct comparisons to France is not really helpful because the ICE is not meant to be the equivalent of the TGV network, since Germany does not split it's network into "high speed" lines with special access conditions designed only for dedicated services and "non-high speed". All lines are accessible to all types of train. There are ICE services which use no new-build high speed line, and regional commuter services which run exclusively on new build high speed lines.
