in 1988; since 1993, it has been the DB Class 143 responsible for freight service. In 1985, the section between Stuttgart and Böblingen was incorporated into the network of the Stuttgart S-Bahn. Since then, the S-Bahn travels from Stuttgart Hbf on the Verbindungsbahn (Stuttgart), which is entirely underground in the center of the city, and which meets up with the Gäubahn at the Stuttgart Österfeld station. The Verbindungsbahn cuts down the trip distance of the S-Bahn by 5.5 kilometers, and puts the University of Stuttgart into the rail network, while regional and long-distance trains still use the old Gäubahn route. The section between Stuttgart-Österfeld and Stuttgart-Rohr, 3.5 kilometers in length, was expanded at high expense into 4 tracks between 1982 and 1983. New long-distance and local service (since 1990) By 1991, the number of express trains on the Gäubahn increased to eight daily trains, with five of those continuing on past Zurich to the cities of Milan, Genoa, and Lecce or Naples. On the other hand, traffic to the north was largely eliminated; for example, just a single express trains traveled on to Nuremberg at the time. The trip between Stuttgart and Singen now took exactly two hours, and was made by locomotives of the DB Class 110 and DB Class 181. Starting in 1993, the Deutsche Bundesbahn, and, from 1994, the privatized Deutsche Bahn AG, attempted to shorten express trip times even further. To achieve this goal, the Gäubahn saw test drives of the Italian Pendolino, as well as the Swedish X 2000. Between 1993 and 1995, two trains of the service type EuroCity replaced some of the traditional express trains on the line. For a short time, TEE-RABe trains of the Swiss Federal Railways were in use, which cut the trip time between Stuttgart and Singen to 1 hour and 50 minutes. On 1 March 1998, two tilting trains of the type ETR 470, owned by the Swiss firm Cisalpino AG, replaced some express service trains, since German tilting technology trains were not available for service yet. This replacement did not initially result in shorter trip times. In 1999, the DB AG radically altered long-distance traffic on the Gäubahn, and stopped, with one exception, using locomotive-powered trains altogether. For the first time, trains of the type DB AG Class 415 with tilting technology were used on the line, and these trains, together with the Cisalpino, made up the