Siemens Mobility is building its first Rail Service Center in Poland, creating a 4,300m² maintenance facility at Gądki near Poznań for locomotive fleets operating across Poland and Central and Eastern Europe.
The depot is scheduled to open in 2027 and will accommodate up to seven locomotives simultaneously. Around five kilometres of electrified track will serve the facility, alongside an underfloor wheel lathe, dropping table, dedicated testing area, and equipment for both light and heavy maintenance.
Service operations will use Railigent X, Siemens Mobility’s digital rail asset-management platform, alongside existing fleet and spare-parts systems. The objective is to combine condition information and maintenance planning with the physical workshop capacity required to carry out the resulting interventions.
The investment expands an established Polish maintenance organisation. Siemens Mobility has more than 15 years of locomotive-service experience in the country, where a team of more than 60 specialists already supports several hundred locomotives each year, including Vectron, Taurus, and BR189-F4 vehicles.
The new centre will broaden the work that can be performed locally. Planned services range from scheduled inspection and safety-system maintenance to major overhauls, modifications, accident repairs, and mobile support.
That breadth matters because a modern multi-system locomotive is a dense collection of mechanical, electrical, electronic, and software systems. Traction equipment, braking, wheelsets, signalling interfaces, communications, onboard control, safety systems, cooling, and high-voltage hardware all need maintenance across an operating life measured in decades.
For cross-border freight fleets, workshop availability becomes particularly important. Multi-system locomotives are purchased precisely because they can operate through several national networks without being exchanged at borders. The same flexibility loses value if heavy maintenance requires the vehicle to spend days travelling to a distant depot before work can begin.
The Gądki facility is designed to reduce that constraint by placing additional capability inside a major Central European rail market. Poland connects Baltic ports, Germany, Central Europe, and routes further east, while both national and private freight operators have increased their use of modern interoperable locomotives.
Workshop equipment determines how efficiently some of the most common heavy-maintenance jobs can be completed. An underfloor wheel lathe can restore wheel profiles without removing the wheelset from the vehicle, while a dropping table allows large components such as bogies or wheelsets to be lowered from beneath a locomotive without dismantling much of the body above them.
Neither technology is new, but integrating them into a purpose-built maintenance flow can reduce handling, workshop occupation, and unnecessary disassembly. For operators, those hours have a direct commercial value because an unavailable locomotive is not moving a train.
Digital condition monitoring is intended to reduce unplanned workshop visits as well. Traditional preventive maintenance brings equipment in at predetermined intervals; condition-based approaches use operating data to identify components whose behaviour is changing, allowing some interventions to be planned closer to actual need.
That only works when information and physical capacity are connected. Detecting a developing fault several days early provides little benefit if no technician, spare part, workshop slot, or specialist equipment is available when the locomotive arrives.
Gądki therefore links Siemens’ digital service proposition with workshop infrastructure. Railigent X can help identify maintenance priorities and organise fleet information, while the depot provides the tracks, machinery, test equipment, and engineers needed to complete the work.
The centre is also planned to operate carbon neutrally, adding an energy-efficiency element to an investment whose principal purpose remains fleet availability. Siemens has not positioned the development as a stand-alone sustainability project; the commercial case rests on expanding service capacity and shortening access to maintenance for regional customers.
Siemens Mobility has been certified as an Entity in Charge of Maintenance in Poland since 2021, providing the management and engineering framework required for maintenance responsibility. The new centre will consolidate that capability within a larger physical operation.
It will also become part of Siemens Mobility’s network of more than 130 service locations across more than 30 countries. That network has become a significant part of the rail manufacturer’s business as operators increasingly purchase availability, maintenance, digital diagnostics, and lifecycle support alongside rolling stock.
New locomotives arrive in fleets periodically; maintenance demand remains for decades. Gądki reflects that less spectacular but more persistent industrial workload, where workshop turnaround, repeat failures, spare-parts availability, and fleet utilisation matter more than the ceremony attached to the original vehicle order.
