Ermewa Brand Guidelines: Swiss Wine Wagons, SNCF Years and the Streem Group

A Swiss start in 1956.

Ermewa did not begin as a railway subsidiary. The company says it was created in Switzerland in 1956 to carry wine by rail, and French Wikipedia describes the founder as a private Swiss entrepreneur. German Wikipedia adds that the early business centred on wine in tank wagons. In 1970 Ermewa bought Leduc SA, a firm that moved, cleared and stored wine products, and in 1971 it opened its first office in Paris, according to the company’s own history.

The move into industrial wagons came in 1981, when Ermewa bought a fleet of 1,000 wagons in France. Growth then came through purchases. The company lists the SATI group in 1989, with about 10,000 tank wagons; 1,100 wagons from the ARBEL fleet and 2,500 dry-bulk wagons from the Deutsche Reichsbahn, the former East German railway, in 1991; the Compagnie Auxiliaire du Midi, with grain and sugar wagons, tank containers and port facilities, in 1992; and a grain and sugar fleet from the Brambles group in 1996. German Wikipedia gives the same sequence and notes that a sea transport arm, restructured in 1978, was sold in 2003.

The French state railway arrived as a shareholder in stages. SNCF took 10 percent of Ermewa France in 1992 and raised that to about a third in 1998; in 1999 it took 45 percent of the Swiss holding company, both French Wikipedia and the company say. In 2003 the private equity firm Investors in Private Equity took a majority of 50.4 percent, French and German Wikipedia report, and in 2010 SNCF became the sole owner. English Wikipedia records that the European Commission cleared that full acquisition in January 2010, through an SNCF holding company in its freight and logistics division. The same year Ermewa took over the France Wagons fleet, which the company puts at 37,000 wagons.

Tank wagons, hoppers and containers.

Ermewa leases freight wagons to industrial shippers, freight forwarders and rail operators. Its website sorts the fleet into plain types: chemical, gas and oil tank wagons, box wagons, hopper and powder wagons, flat and covered flat wagons, open-top wagons, car carriers and intermodal container wagons. The sectors it names run from grain, sugar and steel to aggregates, coal, wood, palletised goods and track works. French Wikipedia says the fleet covers more than 350 wagon types.

The company has kept buying fleets. It lists more than 7,000 wagons from the grain specialist CTC and the aggregates fleet SGW, folded into Ermewa SA in 2016, the year it reorganised its wagon business under the single Ermewa brand; more than 600 container wagons from the Macquarie European Rail fleet in 2018; and coil and container wagons from Express Group and Roscoe in 2019. In 2021 it agreed a sale-and-leaseback of 4,000 wagons with the rail operator Lineas, the company says.

Maintenance sits alongside leasing. Ermewa says it has been certified as an Entity in Charge of Maintenance since 2010 and that it gained ISO 9001 certification in 1996. Its sister business Inveho runs wagon workshops in France and Germany; French Wikipedia says the workshops traded as Ermewa Workshops until 2017 and that three workshops of the Villemann group joined in January 2021. The group’s tank container lines, Eurotainer and Raffles Lease, are used to carry and store liquids and liquefied gases, French Wikipedia says.

Fleet figures change with each purchase. Ville, Rail & Transports reported more than 45,000 Ermewa wagons in April 2023 and called it the second-largest wagon lessor in Europe. French Wikipedia records the 50,000th wagon, a Laaers type, in May 2025, and the company’s own figures now give more than 50,000 wagons, 18 offices and 14 countries. Its research pages describe a lighter wagon, a new wagon for palletised goods and work on digital automatic coupling.

Design and documentation.

Railcar and wagon lessors sell something most people only glimpse from a level crossing: the use of a freight car for a fixed term. Their identities are built for two audiences at once. One is the shipper, railroad or logistics firm signing a lease; the other is everyone who sees the car roll past, because the lessor’s name is often painted on the side of the wagon itself. The car body works as a moving sign for the company that owns it.

Their websites tend to be organised around equipment. Fleet pages are usually split by wagon type, so tank cars for chemicals and mineral oils sit apart from covered hoppers, gondolas, flat cars, boxcars and intermodal wagons, and locomotives often have their own section. Photographs show the cars as the companies publish them, side-on and in yards or on the main line, with the lessor’s name and markings clearly legible.

Service pages carry much of the rest. Lessors describe maintenance workshops and field teams, training on handling wagons, and customer portals where fleets can be managed online. Several now present telematics: sensors and wireless devices that report a car’s location, condition and cargo status in near real time. Sustainability pages make the case for rail freight more broadly, and some describe the conversion or rebuilding of older cars.

Several of these companies are listed or owned by infrastructure investors, so investor pages, quarterly results and fleet counts take up a large share of what they publish. Palettes in this category are often restrained, with blues, reds, greens, greys and black recurring as our interpretation of the sector rather than as any company’s official colours. The guides that follow use tones of our own choosing.

From SNCF to Streem.

State ownership lasted just over a decade. French Wikipedia says SNCF hired Lazard in October 2020 to sell Ermewa, announced an agreement in April 2021 with the Quebec investor Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec (CDPQ) and the German asset manager DWS, and completed the sale on 28 October 2021. The company’s history confirms that DWS and CDPQ have held all of the Ermewa group since 2021, and Ville, Rail & Transports described the same sale in 2023.

In April 2023 the group took a new name. Ville, Rail & Transports reported on 11 April 2023 that Ermewa Group had become Streem, with its president, David Zindo, calling the name “a major strategic decision” meant to show the unity of the group. Streem gathered five offers: Ermewa for wagons, Inveho for workshops, and Eurotainer, Raffles Lease and DEMI for tank containers. The company says the Ermewa brand itself was kept unchanged, so the wagon business still trades under its 1956 name from offices in Levallois-Perret, in the Paris region.

Leadership changed again in 2026. Bahnblogstelle reported on 24 February 2026 that Peter Reinshagen, the long-serving managing director of Ermewa, had moved to a business development role at Streem, that Cyrille Guyon had taken over as managing director from 18 February 2026, and that Bernhard Hoffmann had become chief commercial officer. The company marks its 70th year in 2026.

For a design guide, Ermewa shows how a lessor’s name can outlast several owners and a group rebrand while the wagons carry on under the original mark. Compare Akiem, another lessor that grew up inside SNCF, and VTG, the German wagon lessor. For this guide we use depot blue, wine red and grain gold with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Ermewa’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.