611 on the Swabian Railway

I don't think I had a picture of this type of train before; I know I had never ridden one before. And now that I have, I'm not particularly eager to repeat the experience.

The class 611 was the second generation tilting regional train in Germany. Where it's predecessor, the class 610, used italian tilting technology from (then) FIAT, the 611 used technology developed in-house by the german railroad industry. It was… not a complete failure, I guess, after all the trains are still running. But there were massive reliability issues that required multiple groundings of the whole fleet, or the tilting technology to be disabled, or shortened maintenance intervals and so on. As a result, not a lot of them were ordered. Instead procurement shifted to the upgraded second generation, the class 612, which was supposed to solve all these issues. It didn't, these trains had all the same issues. Oh, and then there was the long-distance diesel tilting train, class 605 (ICE TD), which was an even bigger disaster, so much that some 612s replaced 605s on some services. Nowadays, the 605 is in service to Denmark, replacing incredibly unreliable IC4 trains there, which goes to show that things could always be worse.

This 611 is in dire need of a mid-lifecycle refresh. It got new seat coverings, but it's also full of accumulated decades of dirt and grime and rust here and there. I'm not sure it will get this refresh; maybe it will just be replaced by 612s that get cascaded down from other lines, replaced by non-tilting trains. It seems tilting technology is an experiment that Germany has more or less given up on. The train was still okay for my trip from Ulm (in this picture) to Singen, but it's far from great.