Alan,

Thanks for posting this. It's of particular interest to me because I travelled from Frankfurt to Koeln by ICE along the 300kph line with my family just a couple of weeks before the incident. On my trip, the train came to a standstill for 15-20 minutes in the middle of nowhere while the engineer inspected suspicious noises from a bogie on one of the coaches. The train continued once he had satisfied himself that passenger safety was not at risk, but at reduced speed since the comfort of passengers in the affected coach would be degraded.

Then, on my flight back to Canada, I read in a German railroad magazine that DBAG has withdrawn most if not all of its ICE3 units from service on the high-speed Paris-Saarbruecken-Frankfurt line because of reliability problems apparently caused by thermal issues on the very fast (over 300kph) French section of the route. French TGV POS trains are currently being substituted.

It's beginning to look to me as if the highly vaunted German engineering has, in the case of the ICE3, produced a lemon. And I say that as a person of German parentage.

Tom