Voith Turbo

Updated: August 2026 – Most spotters know Voith Turbo through a single locomotive: the Gravita, with its centre cab and two unequal-length bonnets. That’s the visible tip. The company’s real contribution to German railway operations sits deeper, in the transmission – and that reaches back much further than locomotive building does.

Log shunting locos before they vanish back into the yard

Number, place and time captured in seconds – you can work out the type at your leisure afterwards.

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Why a transmission manufacturer turns up in a vehicle directory

Voith is an engineering group based in Heidenheim an der Brenz, whose roots reach back to 1867. The path there ran through water turbines – in other words, through fluid dynamics. That is exactly what gave rise to what makes the group important for the railway: the hydrodynamic transmission.

For you at the trackside, that means one important distinction. Voith is, in the vast majority of cases, a supplier, not a vehicle manufacturer. The name sits inside locomotives that other companies built. Only for a limited stretch of time was Voith additionally a locomotive builder in its own right, with its own works in Kiel. That phase is where the vehicles you’d call “Voith locos” today come from.

Hydrodynamics: Germany’s own path for diesel drive

A diesel locomotive somehow has to get its engine’s power to the wheels. Internationally, the detour through a generator and traction motors – diesel-electric – became the dominant solution. Germany went a different way: the power travels through a fluid circuit, via a torque converter.

That has consequences you can hear. A hydrodynamic locomotive winds its engine speed up smoothly when starting off, with no audible gear steps. Once you’ve paid attention to this, you’ll tell the two principles apart on the platform more reliably than from any nameplate. This design shapes an entire vehicle generation: Class 218 is the best-known example, and it stands in for dozens of other types. How to place this generation as a whole is shown in the article on older-generation diesel locomotives of classes 218 and 232.

Gravita, Maxima, L04 – what came out of Kiel

The Gravita 10 BB is the type you’re most likely to encounter. It replaced older shunting locos at DB Cargo Deutschland and runs as class 261 in traffic red. The Gravita 15L BB is the longer sibling and carries the class number 265.

Quite different are the Maxima 30 CC and the Maxima 40 CC: six-axle, very long machines with a single large diesel engine instead of the usual twin-engine solution. They remained a niche. There is no reliable public source on the current distribution of these vehicles today – if you want to see one, you’re either lucky or you’re not. In between sits the four-axle main-line machine, documented for instance by the Voith L04-18035, which mostly runs with leasing companies and private keepers.

How to identify a Voith loco trackside

Where you’ll realistically encounter these vehicles

Gravita locos are workhorses in shunting service. That means they rarely stand photogenically on a platform, but in the yard, at transfer points and on private sidings. Maschen marshalling yard is one of the few places where heavy shunting operations can be watched reasonably well from outside. The hub at Hamm (Westphalia) is also worthwhile, because transfer runs and long-distance freight trains follow each other closely there, and the shunting loco becomes visible between two workings.

For the main-line machines with private keepers, freight-heavy lines are the better choice. There, vehicles from several factories and decades mix, often in leasing-company colours rather than operator colours – a good place to practise reading the data panel instead of relying on liveries.

Collect Gravita sightings systematically

With the Traintrack app you can see which shunting locos others are reporting at the same hub right now.

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Voith, or a different Kiel-built manufacturer after all?

The most common mix-up happens between Voith and Vossloh, or rather its predecessor MaK. Both built in Kiel, both supplied four-axle diesel locomotives for similar fields of use. The body shape tells them apart reliably: centre cab for Voith, mostly end cab for the MaK types such as the MaK G 1206.

Verdict

Voith Turbo is the rare case of a supplier that built vehicles itself for a while – and whose most important contribution still stays invisible. The Gravita is the face, the turbo transmission the real story.

For practice at the trackside that means: take the body shape as your starting point, but do not confuse components with manufacturers. A locomotive with a Voith transmission is not a Voith locomotive, and a multiple unit with a Scharfenberg coupler even less so.

Note the body shape, secure the number, work it out later

That's how a fleeting shunting-loco sighting turns into an entry that still holds up in five years.

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