The era of once-famous Metropolitan trains in Germany is over. Deutsche Bahn has withdrawn the two unique sets of passenger coaches. To commemorate the last rides, one of the trains got special stickers.
The Metropolitan Train Express or Metropolitan (MET) was launched in 1999 as a high-end train service between Cologne and Hamburg. The loco-hauled trains reached speeds of up to 220 km/h and were business-class-only. Despite DB’s best efforts – they built two brand new seven-car push-pull trainsets – the service was discontinued in December 2004. The reason was simple – low average occupancy rates of around 30%.
And so, the MET trains lost their silver livery with orange logos. In 2005, they were repainted in standard IC/ICE colors. Special was that they belonged to the ICE product category.
As stated before, each MET train has seven cars, and it is pulled/pushed by specially equipped electric locomotives (“WTB-Met”), being either 101 130 or 131, which both had a similar silver livery until 2005. 101 124 and 126 served as reserves, but these always remained red.
One set just got a bit of its old design back, to ‘celebrate’ the end of its DB career. Around two windows wide, a section is silver. The driving trailer features the Metropolitan logos again, and the text “Letzter Einsatztag 10.12.2021”.
Today the final train made its farewell trip (the other one is already stored in Mukran, DE). As ICE 1052 it ran to Cologne, pushed by 101 130. From there it went back to Berlin as ICE 1051. We thank Sebastian Todt for the final picture:
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