>>1702181In 2017, I lived in the Berlin area.
I took an ICE to Leipzig and it stopped in Wittenberg and Bad Düben on its way down - the train was a Hamburg-München service.
In contrast, I took an IC from Augsburg to Berlin. I'm not sure where the train started from, or its final destination, but it was non-stop between Leipzig and Berlin.
Between Nürnberg and Leipzig, it used the now old route with a stop in Coburg and Jena Paradies (which is pretty much abandoned now that the Erlangen-Erfurt high speed line is operational).
In my experience, the irony was that the ICE actually tended to stop more frequently than the IC. But with the ICE you'd have service frequency of between every 1-3 hours. The IC would be a service that'd be seen maybe... 2-3 times a day, with some IC services being once a day.
DB don't make much sense to me these days. It feels like their ICE services, outside of major corridors like Berlin-München, Berlin-Hamburg, Berlin-Köln/Düsseldorf, Köln-Stuttgart and I guess Frankfurt-Paris are actually just IC services in a nicely furnished multiple unit. Maybe that's why they went with the ICE 4, slow but comfy.
I'd argue, even, that some journeys are actually faster if you take the EC or ÖBB RailJet since those services just skip entire urban centres to just connect major cities in different countries.
The EC service from Hamburg to Budapest is faster than any ICE between Hamburg, Berlin and Dresden.
