DB Class 143

Updated: August 2026 – Angular front, wide wraparound window band, four axles and a double-deck train behind it: the Class 143 is one of the locomotives you’d have seen practically everywhere on German local services for decades. This page shows how to identify it, how to separate it from its faster sisters and why documenting it is worthwhile right now.

What is the Class 143?

The Class 143 is a four-axle electric general-purpose locomotive with roughly 3,720 kW continuous power output and 120 km/h top speed. It was built as Class 243 at the Lokomotivbau Hennigsdorf works for Deutsche Reichsbahn and renumbered to 143 after the two German railway administrations were merged.

Its significance lies in the number built and its spread: it was the Reichsbahn’s standard locomotive for almost anything that ran under overhead wire, and after 1990 it was also used in the western parts of the country. The Deutsche Bahn AG has been the owner since the rail reform. That makes it one of the few classes that were genuinely present nationwide in everyday service after reunification.

The number logic: from 243 to 143

The renumbering isn’t an administrative detail – it’s the key to understanding the whole vehicle family.

• Deutsche Reichsbahn kept its electric locomotives in the 2xx range: 211, 242, 243, 250, 252.
• Deutsche Bundesbahn had occupied this range with diesel locomotives since the 1968 renumbering – 211, 216, 218 and others.
• After reunification, the Reichsbahn electric locomotives therefore had to move. They shifted into free slots of the 1xx range, which stands for electric locomotives: 243 became 143, 250 became Class 155, 252 became Class 156.
• The faster variants of the same family landed further forward in the range, at 112 and 114 – fitting the logic that low numbers stand for faster passenger locomotives.

Exactly where to find these digits on the vehicle is explained in the guide to finding train numbers and vehicle numbers.

How to identify a 143 in the field

Which locomotive of the Hennigsdorf family is that?

Where it fits into railway operations

The 143 follows locomotive-hauled local service. Where multiple units have taken over – as with the S-Bahn Mitteldeutschland – it disappears, and that’s exactly what makes it more interesting for spotters than twenty years ago.

Location	Chance of a sighting	Why
Regional routes with push-pull trains	high	Core territory of the class
Major hub stations on these lines	high	Turnaround times at the platform, good views of the locomotive
S-Bahn systems with locomotive-hauled trains	medium	Historically an important field of use
Multiple-unit-only lines	very low	No locomotive-hauled service
Long-distance routes	low	Too slow for fast long-distance trains

Spotting and photo tips

• Sort out the platform side beforehand. In push-pull operation the locomotive stands sometimes at the front, sometimes at the back. Pick the wrong side and you photograph the driving trailer.
• Choose a three-quarter view. Around 30 to 45 degrees off the vehicle axis shows the front and window band at once – the class’s most important body feature.
• Get the number in the frame. Because the body shape alone doesn’t separate the 143 from the 112 and 114, a picture without a legible number is only half the documentation.
• Prefer flat light. Morning and evening light draw out the edges of the front end; midday light flattens them.

Which stations are especially suited for this is collected in the overview of the best stations for trainspotting in Germany. Photography happens exclusively from the platform or from publicly accessible land – tracks, operational railway land and sidings are off limits.

Why documentation is worthwhile right now

The 143 was so omnipresent for decades that hardly anyone photographed it deliberately. That changes exactly when a class heads into retirement.

• Everyday vehicles become rare in hindsight. What passes by hourly today is an archive picture in a few years. Anyone documenting systematically now will later have material hardly anyone else has.
• Numbers are finite. The class has a fixed number of machines. Anyone collecting numbers rather than just classes gets a goal with clear progress – and quickly notices which locomotives are still missing.
• Liveries change faster than vehicles. New service contracts bring new colour schemes and wraps. A dated sighting captures what a locomotive looked like at a particular point in time.
• Operating areas shift. That a particular locomotive ran on a particular line can only be proven later if someone noted it down.

In practice, four pieces of information per sighting are enough: full vehicle number, date, location and service. Everything else – livery, weather, picture number – is a bonus. How to build a searchable collection from that, instead of losing pictures in the camera roll, is described in the article on the photo archive for spotters.

Common mix-ups

The realistic mix-up candidates are the identically built fast variants Class 112.1 and Class 114, the six-axle Class 156 with a very similar front shape, and – with the same duty but a different shape – the West German Class 111.

Verdict

The Class 143 is the locomotive on which you learn the Hennigsdorf new-build generation. Its shape explains several classes at once, and its number path from 243 to 143 tells the story of two merged railway administrations. Because it is being phased out, systematic documentation is worthwhile right now.