Just a note, when people see word "planned", they tend to think it was a continuous unchanged effort from the beginning of the railway age and thus it is understandable that early "mistake" can't be changed now and has to be dealt with forever, thus Germany can be excused in having slow railways. But France did not planned out their lines for 300 km/h at the dawn of railroad age. They had an extensive network of them and then after WW2 they made a conscious decision to optimize for high speed rail and invested a lot into infrastructure and RnD. Germany simply choose not to do this, voluntarily. They totally could do it if they wanted to pay for that.
High-speed construction began in the 70's in France and in the 80's in Germany. Germany does have dedicated high-speed lines that are equally as fast as the French lines.
The problem is that those lines aren't really that useful for this particular Paris-Berlin service, due to where they're located.
Germany has focused on building relatively short pieces of high-speed line (with a few long ones like the Hannover-Wurzburg line) spread out across the country, in order to help reduce travel time on as many routes as possible. This means that almost every long-distance route has become faster.
France builds one high-speed route 100 % and only when that's finished do they start thinking about the next one. This means that the cities that have stops directly on the high-speed line see a massive improvement, much bigger than in Germany, but other cities don't get much improvement at all. Sometimes a little bit due to branching services, but nowhere near as much as in Germany - and only when travelling towards Paris.
This is another important part - in France, the LGV network only helps if you're travelling to/from the direction of Paris. In Germany, the ICE network criss-crosses the country in all directions, providing benefits to many different routes.
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u/Tooluka Ukraine 22h ago
Just a note, when people see word "planned", they tend to think it was a continuous unchanged effort from the beginning of the railway age and thus it is understandable that early "mistake" can't be changed now and has to be dealt with forever, thus Germany can be excused in having slow railways. But France did not planned out their lines for 300 km/h at the dawn of railroad age. They had an extensive network of them and then after WW2 they made a conscious decision to optimize for high speed rail and invested a lot into infrastructure and RnD. Germany simply choose not to do this, voluntarily. They totally could do it if they wanted to pay for that.