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Comment by Glawen | Hacker News Reader

The article argues that German should stop asserting superiority over France and start building a real high speed rail. The thing is that the German ICE can go fast, but not in Germany as only a few rail line allow it. The best example is Stuttgart Paris where you spend nearly as much time in Germany as in France, except that you only have to cover 170km in Germany and 500km in France.

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Going really fast makes much less sense in Germany compared to France.

Frances population is far more centered in mayor hubs while in Germany the population is dispersed much more homogeneous.

In some places the ICE stops every 20km, there are too many curves, or it shares its rails with slower trains.

There is no need for high speed rails here because you can not accelerate anyway.

On the same blog there’s an article criticising exactly this argument in detail: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2021/06/26/meme-weeding-p...

"Looking forward rather than backward, nothing in Germany’s urban geography is an obstacle to a connected high-speed rail network. With central stations and less of the population living in truly isolated rural and small-city communities, Germany can expect to greatly surpass any other Western intercity rail network if it builds high-speed rail, more than reaching DB’s pre-corona 250 million ridership target."

Given a certain proportion of journeys that you want to cover with high-speed rail, I'd say polycentricity still means you need to build more infrastructure than under a monocentric (France) or linear (Italy, Japan) model.

Maybe we need an ICE-Express (I know what ICE stands for). An ICE shouldn't have to stop in every city, that's what ICs and and regional rail is for. It gets ridiculous on lines through the Rhine-Ruhr area, all very large cities that on their own merit an ICE stop, but they're spaced five minutes apart. There is definitely a need for real high speed rail, Hamburg to Munich in less than 3h should be possible, it takes around 6-7h now.

Something like that already exists and is called "ICE Sprinter".

Unfortunately there is no English Wikipedia page about it, but here is the German one: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICE_Sprinter

That‘s the idea of the „ICE Sprinter“, but I imagine it’s even more difficult to integrate into the timetable because of the shared tracks.

Yeah, if I'm not mistaken a lot of the tracks for the french TGV and also the japanese Shinkansen (literally means new main line) are separated from the tracks for slower trains like cargo and regional. But whenever I see the protests of people when there are plans for new tracks I start doubting that I'll ever see a fully separated high speed rail network.

It is slow because it shares the track with other trains. The point of high speed rail network is to connect big hub together without removing existing network. The stop would be every 150/200km. Imagine a Munich Berlin in 2h, that would kill any flights between the two cities.

It makes no sense for ICE to stop in every small town. The entire point of express service is to prioritize speed over coverage. And that entails building enough rail capacity to avoid being throttled by slower lines.

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