Akiem Brand Guidelines: SNCF’s 2008 Locomotive Lessor, Sold to CDPQ in 2022

A lessor born as French rail freight opened up.

Akiem began in 2008, as the French rail freight market opened to competition. The company says it was created that year as a subsidiary of TLP, a holding company of the SNCF group; French Wikipedia gives its legal name as the Société de gestion et de valorisation du matériel de traction, with Akiem as its trade name, and dates the company’s registration to December 2007. Its head office is in Saint-Ouen, on the northern edge of Paris, French Wikipedia says.

The first fleet came from inside the SNCF group. Facing a fall in traffic, Fret SNCF sold part of its locomotive fleet to the new company, French Wikipedia explains, and Akiem’s own timeline records a sale-and-leaseback of 270 Alstom locomotives from Fret SNCF in 2009. Those engines were leased back to Fret SNCF and to private subsidiaries of the group such as VFLI. In 2010 Akiem took over the locomotive fleet of Veolia Cargo and signed its first contract for Bombardier TRAXX electric locomotives, alongside contracts for EMD Class 77 and Vossloh G1000 diesel engines, the company says.

The ownership opened up in 2016. Eurotraction, a company of the German asset manager DWS (then called Deutsche Asset Management), took half of the equity, Akiem says, and the lessor was then held equally by the SNCF group and DWS. That year it ordered 44 DE18 diesel locomotives from Vossloh and signed a framework agreement with Bombardier for 52 TRAXX locomotives. In 2017 it bought mgw Service, a locomotive maintenance business based in Krefeld, Germany, which became the root of its workshop arm.

Locomotives, passenger trains and workshops.

Akiem leases locomotives and passenger trains. Its fleet page describes a mixed fleet of more than 750 new or recent vehicles bought from several manufacturers: electric, diesel and diesel-electric locomotives for freight and passenger trains, and self-propelled passenger units. French Wikipedia lists the main families as Bombardier (now Alstom) TRAXX locomotives, Alstom’s BB 27000, BB 37000 and BB 75000 series, Siemens Vectron and Vossloh diesels, with the Polish maker Newag’s Dragon 2 added after an order for 30 locomotives in 2023.

Passenger trains came in with a deal in 2020. On 17 February that year Akiem announced the takeover of the rolling-stock leasing business of Macquarie European Rail, Ville, Rail & Transports reported on 26 February 2020: 137 locomotives used by 21 operators in Europe and the UK, 30 electric trains leased to the Greater Anglia franchise, 16 diesel trains with a Dutch franchise and 110 wagons, subject to approval by competition authorities. Akiem’s timeline lists the acquisition as made in 2020. In 2022 it set up TerriTrains with Banque des Territoires, a consortium for financing, leasing and managing passenger trains for regions and rail operators, the company says.

Maintenance is the other half of the business. In 2021, Akiem says, it put its whole offer under the single Akiem brand, and mgw Service became Akiem Technik, which runs workshops and spare-parts services for Akiem’s own fleet and for operators that run their own trains. The company says Akiem Technik is ECM-certified under EU regulation 779/2019 and that both companies are certified to ISO 9001:2015. It opened a maintenance centre at Ostricourt in Hauts-de-France in 2024 and a workshop at Borlänge in Sweden in 2025. Its offices are in Germany, Poland, France, the UK, Hungary, Sweden, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, and it says its rolling stock runs in 22 European countries.

How railcar and wagon lessors present themselves.

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.

A Canadian owner since 2022.

The SNCF years ended in 2022. On 1 August that year SNCF and DWS said they had entered exclusive negotiations with the Canadian investor CDPQ, the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, Ville, Rail & Transports reported; Akiem then had about 250 staff and a fleet of more than 600 locomotives and 46 passenger trains. A Groupe SNCF note published in April 2024 says the sale was concluded in December 2022, with CDPQ acquiring the whole of the Akiem group’s capital from SNCF and DWS, and describes Akiem as having the largest fleet on the continent, three-quarters of it electric. Akiem’s own timeline calls La Caisse, as CDPQ now styles itself, its sole shareholder from 2022.

Under the new owner the orders kept coming. Akiem’s timeline lists a framework agreement with Alstom in 2023 for 100 TRAXX Universal multi-system locomotives, further Vectron orders from Siemens Mobility under agreements signed in 2021 and 2025, a contract in 2025 to supply 14 Stadler battery-electric Flirt trains to the German regional operator ODEG, and, in 2026, an agreement with Siemens Mobility for 80 Vectron locomotives, 50 of them firm orders, including the battery-equipped Vectron Dual Mode. Its tagline today is “Rail beyond bounds.”

For a design guide, Akiem shows how a lessor whose customers are other rail operators builds a brand around fleet, finance and workshops: one name over leasing and maintenance since 2021, fleet pages split into locomotives and passenger trains, and a company history told as a dated list of orders. Compare the French wagon lessor Ermewa and the British rolling-stock lessor Beacon. For this guide we use a deep traction blue, a slate grey and a signal amber with a geometric sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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