The ICE from Cologne to Frankfurt

Germany's fastest railway runs from Cologne to Frankfurt in sixty-eight minutes. It covers 180 kilometres, touches 300 km/h for most of the way, and replaced a journey that used to take well over two hours. On the numbers it is one of the most impressive pieces of railway in Europe.

It is also, for most of its length, a view of a motorway.

That is not a criticism so much as the design. When the line was planned in the 1980s the decision was taken to build it for passenger trains only, and to lay it alongside the A3 autobahn — the two running as a single corridor through the hills between the Rhineland and the Rhine-Main plain. Freeing the railway from freight meant it could climb far more steeply than a normal main line, so instead of following the river valleys it goes straight over the Westerwald and the Taunus on gradients of one in twenty-five. Where the hills refused, it went through them: thirty tunnels, some forty-seven kilometres of the route underground.

The result is a railway that is genuinely thrilling for about ninety seconds at a time and otherwise shows you noise walls, cuttings, tunnel mouths and, whenever the trees part, six lanes of German traffic keeping pace outside the window. If what you want from a train between these two cities is scenery, you should not take this one.

The honest version

The line was sold on a number it has never hit. When the federal government settled the route in 1989, the head of the railway told the country the journey would fall from 135 minutes to fifty-eight. A Frankfurt newspaper marked the last rails going down with the headline "a decade for fifty-eight minutes". In the timetable for August 2026, the fastest booked train in either direction is sixty-five minutes southbound and sixty-eight northbound, and most trains take eighty. The promised number is still quoted in places. It has never been run.

None of which makes the line a failure. It carries more than forty thousand people a day, it killed the Cologne–Frankfurt air route outright — Lufthansa withdrew the flights entirely in 2007 — and sixty-eight minutes between two cities two hundred kilometres apart remains a remarkable thing to be able to buy for the price of a train ticket. It is just worth knowing what you are buying.

And the alternative

Here is the part the timetable does not advertise. Deutsche Bahn runs ICE trains between Cologne and Frankfurt by two completely different routes, and they cost the same.

The fast ones go the way this page describes. The others — roughly hourly, in the middle of each hour — go the old way, down the left bank of the Rhine through Bonn and Koblenz, past the castles and the vineyards and the Loreley, and take two hours and twenty minutes. That extra seventy minutes buys you what is probably the most beautiful stretch of railway in Germany, which we cover separately as the Middle Rhine.

So the useful thing this page can tell you is not "ride the fast train". It is that the choice exists, that it is the same ticket, and that it is worth making deliberately. The high-speed line is the one for when the point is to arrive — and it is worth riding once for what it is: a railway built to a standard no other line in the country meets, doing something no other train in Germany can.

Trains leave Cologne from the Hauptbahnhof, in the shadow of the cathedral, and spend the first quarter of an hour not going fast at all. The high-speed line does not actually begin until Köln-Porz, nine kilometres out, and the approach through the city is shared with everything else — across the Hohenzollern Bridge over the Rhine at a crawl, then out through the eastern suburbs on tracks that carry S-Bahn, regional and freight trains too. Between Porz and Troisdorf there are six parallel tracks, and the limit is 200 km/h.

The railway proper starts at Siegburg/Bonn, twenty-four kilometres out. Immediately beyond the platforms the line dives into the Siegauen tunnel, passes under the river Sieg, comes out heading south-east — and meets the A3. From here to the outskirts of Frankfurt the two are rarely more than a few hundred metres apart, and often close enough that you can read the lorries' number plates.

Up the Westerwald

What follows is the part that makes this line unusual. Over the next fifteen kilometres the railway climbs into the Siebengebirge on gradients of forty per mille — four per cent, one in twenty-five — which is roughly four times what a conventional main line is built for and steeper than any other high-speed railway in Germany. It reaches about 300 metres at the Rottbitze tunnel, drops into the Wied valley on the Hallerbach viaduct, and climbs straight back out again at the same four per cent. The summit, around 370 metres, comes near Willroth in the Westerwald.

This is why the line was passenger-only from the start, and why for its first fifteen years only one kind of train was allowed on it. Trains here need power to climb and, far more importantly, brakes to come down: the rule was an eddy-current brake, and until December 2017 the only stock that qualified was the ICE 3. Other trains use it now, but the ICE 4 is held to 250 km/h, and a train running with its eddy-current brake switched off is capped lower still.

The middle: two stations almost nobody asked for

Montabaur arrives at kilometre 88, about halfway. It is a small Westerwald town that got a high-speed station largely because Rhineland-Palatinate wanted one, and trains that do not stop go through the middle of it at 300 km/h on dedicated through tracks while the platforms sit to either side. Twenty-one kilometres later comes Limburg Süd, which is the only station in Germany where nothing but ICE trains call — no regional service reaches it at all. It was built south of Limburg on cost grounds, which is why it does not connect to the Lahn valley line and why the cathedral town it is named after is a bus ride away.

Between them the railway is at its best: the Lahn viaduct, a pale arch over the river north of Limburg, and a run of tunnels through the Taunus including the Schulwald, at 4,500 metres the longest on the line.

Down to the Main

After Idstein and Niedernhausen the line falls through the Hellenberg and Schulwald tunnels, throws off a branch to Wiesbaden at Breckenheim, and comes down to the plain. It crosses the Main at Eddersheim, slows through a 220 and then a 200 km/h section, and runs in under The Squaire — the long curved building straddling the tracks — to Frankfurt Airport's long-distance station, opened in 1999 and the first part of the whole project to be finished.

From there it is a last few minutes over the Riedbahn into Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof, and the fast part is over. Total time, if your train has not stopped: sixty-eight minutes.

There is no timetable to memorise here. Something leaves for the other end roughly every twenty minutes through the middle of the day, and the only decision that matters is which kind of train you take — because three different services run between these two cities and they take between sixty-five minutes and two and a half hours.

All times below were checked against Deutsche Bahn's schedule for August 2026. Book and check live times at bahn.de (opens in a new tab).

The three services

The non-stop ICE — 65 to 68 minutes. Cologne to Frankfurt with one call at Frankfurt Airport and nothing else. Southbound these leave Köln Hbf at about xx:18, every two hours through the day — 08:19, 10:19, 12:18, 14:18, 16:18, 18:18, 20:18 — and take 1h08. Northbound from Frankfurt Hbf at about xx:34 — 06:34, 08:33, 10:34, 12:34, 14:34, 18:33 — and these are the fastest trains on the line at 1h05.

The high-speed ICE with stops — 1h09 to 1h25. In the hours between the non-stops, a train leaves Köln at about xx:18 calling at Siegburg/Bonn only (1h09). Roughly every two hours there is also an all-stations run at about xx:29 — Siegburg/Bonn, Montabaur, Limburg Süd, Frankfurt Airport — which takes 1h20. These are the trains to take if you actually want to get off somewhere in the middle.

The Rhine ICE — 2h20. Leaving Köln at about xx:53, roughly hourly, these ignore the high-speed line completely and run down the left bank through Bonn, Koblenz, Bingen and Mainz. Same operator, same ICE trains, same ticket, seventy minutes longer, and incomparably better to look at. This is the route we cover as the Middle Rhine.

First and last

Checked for Wednesday 19 August 2026, both directions:

Two things worth noticing. The last northbound departure from Frankfurt over the high-speed line is 20:14 — surprisingly early — and after that your only option is the Rhine route at 21:42, which does not reach Cologne until one in the morning. And late-evening trains are slower than the same train earlier in the day: the 23:54 out of Cologne is booked at two hours for a journey the 08:19 does in sixty-eight minutes.

Weekends and stops

The pattern barely changes at weekends. Checked for Sunday 16 August 2026, Köln to Frankfurt ran the same two-hourly non-stops at xx:18, the same all-stations trains at xx:29 and the same Rhine service at xx:53 — thirty-one direct ICE departures across the day, against thirty-two on the Thursday.

The intermediate stations are served selectively, so check before you plan around them. Siegburg/Bonn gets most trains; Montabaur and Limburg Süd get roughly one an hour, on the all-stations runs only. A non-stop ICE will pass through Montabaur at 300 km/h without slowing.

One ticket covers Cologne to Frankfurt whichever way your train goes. Deutsche Bahn does not charge more for the high-speed line and does not charge less for the two-and-a-half-hour run down the Rhine, so the scenic route is in effect free. What it costs depends entirely on when you buy: the Sparpreis is cheap, released months ahead and tied to one train; the Flexpreis costs substantially more and lets you take the next departure, which here is rarely more than twenty minutes away.

⚠️ The Deutschlandticket does not work on any train on this page — it is valid on regional services only. It will get you from Cologne to Frankfurt in about three and a quarter hours with a change at Koblenz, past the same Rhine scenery, which is useful if you already hold one and not worth buying for a single journey. Seat reservations are optional but worth the few euros.

A rail pass works on this line, with no supplement and no compulsory reservation — which makes it one of the easier high-speed routes in Europe to use a pass on. Compare that with France or Spain, where every high-speed train needs a paid reservation booked in advance, and Germany starts to look generous.

Which pass

Both the Interrail Global Pass (for European residents) and the Eurail Global Pass (for everyone else) cover ICE trains in Germany, as does the one-country pass for Germany. Show the pass, board the train, sit down. There is no ICE supplement of the kind that TGVs and Frecciarossas charge.

The one thing to plan is a seat. Interrail's own guidance for Germany lists ICE reservations as optional, but recommended during busy periods (opens in a new tab) — and it separately names the ICE line through this corridor, Dortmund–Cologne–Frankfurt–Nürnberg–Vienna, among the busiest routes in Europe (opens in a new tab). A reservation costs a few euros. On a Friday afternoon it is the difference between a seat and the vestibule.

Mandatory reservations do exist on German ICEs, but only on specific international workings — the Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam trains among them. Nothing running Cologne to Frankfurt domestically requires one.

Is a pass worth buying for this journey?

For this journey alone, no — and it is worth saying plainly. A pass only earns its money if you are making several long-distance trips. Cologne to Frankfurt booked a few weeks ahead as a Sparpreis is one of the cheaper long journeys in Germany, and a day of pass validity spent on sixty-eight minutes of travel is a day wasted.

Where a pass does pay here is as part of a wider trip — and this route is unusually good value on a pass for a specific reason. Because the fast line and the Rhine line cost a pass-holder exactly the same (nothing), you can take the high-speed train south in the morning and come back up the Rhine in the evening, on the same day's travel, and pay no more for the scenic route than for the fast one. Very few pass journeys in Europe give you that choice.

What a pass does not cover

The Deutschlandticket is not a rail pass and is not valid on any ICE — see the ticket section above. And a pass does not cover the S-Bahn ride out to Cologne/Bonn Airport if your ICE does not call there, nor the Stadtbahn from Siegburg into Bonn, both of which are local services on separate tariffs.

Pass conditions checked against Interrail's own Germany page and its list of busy routes on 20 August 2026. Interrail and Eurail change their terms annually — the issuer's page is the one that binds.

This is a line you get off, rather than a line you look out of. The stops are few and far apart — four between the two cities — but three of them open up places most visitors to Germany never reach, and the two ends are among the best city stops in the country.

The trick is knowing which trains call where. Only the all-stations ICEs, roughly one an hour, serve Montabaur and Limburg Süd; the fast trains go through both at full speed. Check before you plan a day around either.

Sixty-eight minutes is not a journey you break. Nobody rides this line and stops overnight halfway — the point of it is that you do not have to — so the beds that matter are at the two ends, and both cities put them within a few minutes' walk of the platforms.

Cologne is the easier of the two. The Hauptbahnhof sits directly beside the cathedral, and the hotels on Trankgasse and the streets behind it are close enough that you can leave breakfast ten minutes before your train. Frankfurt's Hauptbahnhof opens onto the Bahnhofsviertel, a quarter with a reputation and a genuine renaissance going on in it: the blocks immediately around the station hold some of the more interesting small hotels in the city alongside some of its rougher corners, and it repays looking at a map before booking.

Two houses are listed below rather than the usual three. Several plausible candidates in the middle of the line either could not be reached at all or turned out not to be trading — one Limburg hotel answers with a single page announcing that it closed at the end of July 2026 — and a hotel we cannot stand behind gets no card.