the establishment of the Group of 20 (Gruppe der 20) on the evening 8 October. With a combined 156 arrivals and departures of scheduled long-distance trains per day in the station in the summer 1989 timetable, it was the third most important node in the network of Deutsche Reichsbahn, after Berlin and Leipzig. After the political changes in the GDR Since the 1990s, Dresden has gradually become part of the Intercity network. From 1991, individual Intercity services ran via Leipzig and the Thuringian Railway to Frankfurt am Main and these service have run every two hours since 1992. The first pair of EuroCity services ran from Dresden to Paris-Est over the same route on 2 June 1991. That same year, InterRegio trains served Dresden for the first time. The 2048/2049 and 2044/2143 trains pairs ran between Cologne and Dresden. Later, other connections were added. In 1993, a north–south connection through Dresden was included in the EuroCity network and some of the eight EC trains that now run to Prague, Vienna and Budapest were introduced. On 25 September 1994, scheduled Intercity-Express (ICE) services operated for the first time to the station. The ICE Elbkurier ran in the evening on the line from the Zoo station in Berlin to Dresden in one hour and 58 minutes. In the morning there was a service in the opposite direction. The introduction of the ICE meant that construction work at the station had to be carried out in advance. Until the timetable change on 28 May 2000, a pair of trains ICE ran daily via Berlin to Dresden, then the hourly ICE line 50 service, which has continued to the present, was introduced from Dresden to Frankfurt via Leipzig, eliminating the connection via Berlin. Dresden station became the starting point of the central east–west connection in the German ICE network. This change caused changes in locomotive-hauled long-distance operations, since Dresden was now served almost exclusively in the north–south direction by Intercity (IC) and EuroCity (EC) trains. There were other related changes to the IC/EC network. So already the service, subsequently numbered EC/IC 27 (Prague–Dresden–Berlin), received a through connection to Hamburg in 1994 and in 2003 two pairs of trains continued to Vienna and a pair of trains continued to Aarhus in Denmark for the first time. ICE TD (class 605) services ran on the Saxon-Franconian trunk line to Nuremberg from 10 June 2001. These replaced