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ince the day of the first Court and Imperial Train, technology
and traveling comforts have come a long way. There are
high-speed trains that can travel more than 300 kilometers
per hour, there are luxury compartments furnished in fine leather,
open-plan carriages with air conditioning. The conductor – in first
class, anyway – serves coffee, wine, and snacks, the welcome is
bilingual, there are "double-decker" City Night Express trains, each
with a telephone and Internet docking station.
None of this interested Gottfried Rieck. For his train, he wanted to
use the technology of the end of the nineteenth century – as did the
constructors of the original imperial train a hundred years before.
But it was also to become a train that would do justice to the
quotation by Empress Elisabeth:
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