Interlok Bahnconsulting

Updated: August 2026 – A single shunting locomotive in works colours, a short freight train in front of it: it looks like one company. In fact it’s often five. Interlok Bahnconsulting is one of the service providers that make this arrangement possible in the first place – and who consequently appear nowhere on the vehicle, yet are involved in a surprising number of train workings.

Keeper markings beat any lettering

Note what's in the data panel – logged with Traintrack in seconds and findable for good.

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What a railway undertaking needs before it can run trains

The view of a railway company is skewed from outside. You see a locomotive and think of a workshop and a fleet. Legally, though, a railway undertaking is above all a collection of certificates.

Among the things needed are an operating licence, a safety certificate, a working safety management system, operational rulebooks, trained and regularly examined staff, an emergency organisation, and a named railway operations manager. This list is essentially the same whether an operation has two vehicles or two hundred.

That’s what creates the market for rail consulting: for a small company, it’s uneconomical to maintain this expertise permanently in-house. So it gets bought in instead.

Five roles, one train

The practical payoff of this page lies in a table. Once you’ve taken it on board, you’ll make noticeably fewer mistakes when logging sightings.

The decisive row is the last one. A rail-consulting company appears nowhere. It influences whether and how a train runs, but leaves no trace you could photograph.

Why new operators always start the same way

A young railway undertaking almost always follows the same pattern: a second-hand locomotive, hired or bought cheaply, one or two workings, staff partly external. The reason is economic – new vehicles have delivery times of years and prices a young company can’t finance.

That’s why the same vehicle families keep turning up. The V 100 derivatives, meaning the Class 203 and its relatives, have been the entry-level machine in freight for decades. At medium power ratings, the family built around the MaK G 1206 dominates, classified as Class 273. For shunting duties, the Vossloh G 6 is often added.

Only once an operator has stable contracts do modern electric machines follow. The Siemens Vectron and the Bombardier TRAXX then usually run via hire firms – hardly any small railway undertaking buys such locomotives itself.

Small railway undertakings are fully collectable

If it only has five vehicles, you can have it fully documented within a season. Traintrack shows you what's missing.

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How to untangle a sighting with several parties involved

Works, transfer and trial runs of new operators

When a new railway undertaking sets out, there’s a phase spotters rarely notice consciously. Ahead of the first commercial service come trial and familiarisation runs: staff have to gain route and vehicle knowledge, and both are acquired on real workings.

Such runs operate as light engine moves or with very short train formations, often at unusual times and on routes that later aren’t served at all. Anyone who sees such a vehicle twice in a week on the same route, without it carrying any load, is probably looking at exactly that.

Then there are the transfer runs of the vehicles themselves. A hired locomotive comes from the hire firm’s base, a bought one from the repair works. These runs operate as special trains or light engine moves and are the only opportunity to see a vehicle still in its old livery but already in its new area of operation. How to track down special workings is described in the article on special trains and workings.

When lettering and operator really do match

The last point is the real reason for this page. Consulting, staffing and operations-management service providers keep turning up in sighting lists as supposed operators, because their name appeared in a report or on a website. But they’re not railway undertakings – and a sighting that lists them as operator is simply wrong.

What can be said about this company

Here too: there’s little public substance on Interlok Bahnconsulting. The name and its focus on consulting in the rail sector are identifiable; size, client base and specific service focus would be guesswork and are therefore not claimed here.

That’s typical for the industry: consulting firms live on recommendations and confidentiality, not visibility. What can be described precisely, though, is the function such operations take on in the liberalised market – and that explains a considerable part of what you see at the trackside.

Verdict

Rail consulting is the reason Germany has several hundred railway undertakings rather than a dozen. Without outsourced operations management, bought-in safety management and external licensing support, most small operators simply couldn’t meet the requirements.

For you at the trackside, that means above all one thing: trust no lettering. The vehicle number and the keeper marking in the data panel are the only things that correspond to a registration. Everything else – colour, logo, company name – is a snapshot in a very mobile market.

A logbook that survives an operator change

Number instead of company name: with Traintrack your sightings stay correct even after the next hire swap.

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