---
title: "All aboard, a decade of AM at Deutsche Bahn"
url: https://www.voxelmatters.com/all-aboard-a-decade-of-am-at-deutsche-bahn/
date: 2025-09-23
modified: 2025-09-22
lang: en
author: "Tess Boissonneault"
description: "This week, the Mobility Goes Additive network is hosting its annual meeting in Berlin, an event that will feature a Women in AM Summit. To coincide with this event, we..."
categories:
  - "Executive Interviews"
  - "Transportation"
  - "Women of 3D Printing"
tags:
  - "Featured"
image: https://www.voxelmatters.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/db-1-640x415.jpg
word_count: 1989
---

# All aboard, a decade of AM at Deutsche Bahn

*This week, the Mobility Goes Additive network is hosting its [annual meeting in Berlin](https://www.voxelmatters.com/mga-host-women-in-am-summit-annual-meeting/), an event that will feature a Women in AM Summit. To coincide with this event, we are re-sharing our recent interview with Stefanie Brickwede, Head of AM at Deutsche Bahn and Managing Director of the MGA, originally published in our [Mobility AM eBook](https://www.voxelmatters.com/voxelmatters-mobility-am-focus-2025-ebook/).*

Germany’s national rail service [Deutsche Bahn](https://www.voxelmatters.com/deutsche-bahn-db-3d-prints-100000th-part/) has played a key role in conducting the adoption of additive technologies in the transport industry, not only employing hardware itself but also encouraging application and material development more broadly. This year, the company is marking a big milestone: its tenth year of using 3D printing, offering the perfect opportunity to reflect on the short but impactful history of additive manufacturing within the rail sector and its highly promising future. To elaborate on this, we spoke to Stefanie Brickwede, the Head of Additive Manufacturing at Deutsche Bahn and the Managing Director of [Mobility Goes Additive (MGA)](https://www.voxelmatters.directory/company/mobility-goes-additive-mga/), the Europe-based AM network founded by Deutsche Bahn and seven other market leaders in 2016.

## Mobility Goes Additive

Brickwede starts by telling us about the very first use cases for 3D printing at the national rail service and how the company quickly realized it needed to take a leadership position by founding the MGA. “We started with printing spare parts, particularly those we could not get on the market anymore. At the time, we tried to get in touch with other companies to learn from their experiences, but we were unable to find an appropriate network, so we founded our own, Mobility Goes Additive, which is now the leading network for AM in Europe.”

Today, the MGA network includes over 150 members, including AM companies like Materialise, EOS, Nikon SLM Solutions and 3D Systems, as well as key rail OEMs and suppliers like Alstom and Siemens. The point of this broad network, as Brickwede explains, is to promote collaboration between companies to identify or develop innovative new solutions. “We can use this network to solve challenges that one company could not solve on its own,” she says.

In practice, MGA enables rail companies like Deutsche Bahn to find the best solutions for its production needs. For example, DB could reach out to the network if it was interested in a new additive manufacturing technology and wanted to know if others had experience with it. 

“Especially in the rail working groups, we go into a very frank and open discussion,” she says. “The logic is that the more we share knowledge, the easier we can all scale up and print parts. We rely on the experience of others and if you start with an open minded approach, others will also jump on that, which I’m totally convinced helps the whole AM industry.”

[![Deutsche Bahn 3D printing](https://www.voxelmatters.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/db-2.jpg)](https://www.voxelmatters.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/db-2.jpg)

## A bottom-up approach

Insights from the MGA have played a role in DB’s overall AM strategy, which has evolved over the past decade. In the beginning, the company was primarily targeting spare parts and it took a top-down approach for identifying the correct parts to print. As Brickwede says, this strategy was ultimately not so successful. “We totally failed because we didn’t have the right data to decide whether a part is feasible for AM or not. We then went to the maintenance sites and simply asked our colleagues what parts they thought could benefit from being 3D printed.”

This approach proved more fruitful and Deutsche Bahn was quickly setting off in the right direction. “We started with spare parts and then two or three years later we realized the first safety critical spare parts,” she adds. “At the same time, we also thought tooling could be a good idea, since it does not require that much certification. We also initiated an employee competition to gain more interest in the technology and that has brought up some interesting use cases.”

To put into perspective just how successful DB’s integration of additive manufacturing has been over the past 10 years, the company says it 3D prints over 150,000 parts and has over 700 different use cases that make use of various different AM technologies and materials.

Interestingly, Brickwede adds that at this point, DB is ready to come back to a top-down approach for identifying new AM applications which is based on data and experience it has acquired over the years. “We have very strict impact monitoring so we can say what parts had which effect in terms of money, punctuality and other KPIs. We know that currently, we save at least one to two million euros a year thanks to 3D printed parts.”

## The road to €100M

3D printing spare parts has been particularly impactful for the rail company, not only just for obsolete or hard-to-source parts but also in terms of minimizing the reliance on stockpiles. “We currently have spare parts in stock that are worth €1.8 billion a year. And out of that, we could be printing 10% of that. We don’t, but we could.”

This huge untapped potential for AM is where DB is placing its focus until 2030. “We call it a road to €100 million,” Brickwede elaborates. “We want to identify the right parts and make them printable so that we don’t put them in our physical warehouses anymore.” 

[![Deutsche Bahn 3D printing](https://www.voxelmatters.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/db-3.jpg)](https://www.voxelmatters.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/db-3.jpg)

An integral part of this roadmap is integrating additive manufacturing from the beginning of a part’s lifecycle, specifically in its procurement tenders. “Companies that want to supply trains or parts to us now have to ensure that 10% of spare parts are printable. And we’ve defined what those parts should be. For example, we are focusing on slow movers, big parts and critical parts. The effect is that we are now pushing the whole rail industry towards AM—not only big suppliers like Alstom and Siemens, but also Tier 2 and Tier 3 suppliers.”

## Finding the right materials

One of the biggest considerations for using 3D printing, particularly for spare parts that will be used on trains, is material choice. Rail companies are bound by strict fire safety regulations and materials must meet high standards on this front. “If we want to bring parts into trains, we need flame retardant materials,” Brickwede says. “And this flame retardancy has a very high level, sometimes even higher than in aviation.”

This has meant that the rail industry is currently quite limited when it comes to polymer 3D printing materials. In fact, ULTEM 9085 is one of the few synthetic materials it is using these days, which means that FDM is a central technology used for spare part production. Material options are gradually opening up, however, in large part thanks to MGA. “Two of our members came up with a sufficient material for powder bed fusion, which will be a game-changer in the future,” she says.

Sand printing has also presented big benefits to the company to accelerate the production of large metal components. “A couple of years ago, we had a use case where we needed to print massive parts—weighing 570 kg. Of course, printing that would be very expensive, so instead we printed sand molds and were able to produce the parts using a more conventional approach. This was helpful because we didn’t need to obtain a specific certification and reduced lead times,” she says.

In that particular use case, the company was facing a standstill of 50 cargo locomotives due to missing gear housing boxes. By using 3D printing, DB was able to shorten the lead time by 10 months. This was also a game-changer within the company’s corporate side with board members recognizing how impactful the technology could be. 

Sand casting also played an important role when Deutsche Bahn needed to replace a fan wheel on a rescue train locomotive. The large part, measuring over a meter in diameter and 195 mm in width was ultimately cast from an aluminum alloy. “We had to deal with high minimum order quantities, which we were able to reduce from eight to one by printing the sand mold and producing just one part,” Brickwede says.

[![Deutsche Bahn 3D printing](https://www.voxelmatters.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/db-4.jpg)](https://www.voxelmatters.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/db-4.jpg)

Looking forward, DB is aiming to target more use cases and applications. On the polymer side, Brickwede says that elastomers are currently an area of focus. “With rubber components on trains, they have to be replaced after six years at the latest—which is nothing in the rail industry where we operate trains for up to 50 years. If that rubber component is used in a brake system, that’s just three years. So if we have a reliable 3D printed elastomer, that could be very helpful from a sustainability point of view.”

## Next stop, repair operations

AM for repairing parts is also on the horizon, with DED being targeted as an important process. “We are just about to start in this area: we think that DED repair solutions could be used to repair some motor parts and other complex components, but we are still exploring how to dive into that. We are also working on high-performing aluminums for repair solutions,” Brickwede tells us. 

Eventually, once the right technology and use cases have been identified, DB plans to integrate DED at a Deutsche Bahn maintenance site, expanding its in-house 3D printing capabilities.

Presently, Deutsche Bahn operates a number of 3D printing systems, including hundreds of desktop FDM 3D printers used for training purposes, first prototypes and giveaways. For spare parts, the company relies on a suite of industrial FDM 3D printers as well as some SLS platforms.

“In-house at DB we have two sites: one that is responsible for printing tooling, jigs and fixtures, and the other does polymer spare parts,” Brickwede explains. “All other parts, like metal components, are printed by service providers out of which some are also partners in the network. Together with other network members, Deutsche Bahn has co-initiated an international quality standard for additive manufacturing facilities.”  The DIN EN ISO/ASTM 52920 standard is an industry-neutral standard beyond the rail sector and establishes a comprehensive framework for quality assurance requirements.

## Innovation and inclusivity

Much of Deutsche Bahn’s ethos surrounding 3D printing is represented in this wide-reaching standard that is not only helpful for Deutsche Bahn itself, but also for other rail companies and other industries generally. This collaborative and inclusive approach has proven successful over the past decade for Deutsche Bahn, with the company not only helping others through its knowledge but also learning through example. 

[![MGA Annual Meeting Women in AM Summit](https://www.voxelmatters.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/mga-women-in-am.jpg)](https://www.voxelmatters.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/mga-women-in-am.jpg)

For instance, the Dutch were the first to implement 3D printing requirements in their rail procurement tenders. “The Netherlands is a bit smaller than Germany. So it was good we had the chance to observe and evaluate their introduction before we added ‘design for additive’ to our tenders,” she says. “This is such a great and inspiring cooperation that really helps, and we are now trying to open that up to public transport in general.”

Another example of DB’s inclusive philosophy is related to its use of 3D printing to create a series of braille handrail signs, which have been installed at thousands of stations around Germany, while also enabling the company to reduce associated costs by over 60%.

Brickwede also sees potential to extend this inclusive, collaborative approach further—not only in rail but also in the additive manufacturing industry—particularly when it comes to gender diversity. “We need to encourage more women to get into the industry: we have a different perspective on additive manufacturing and we come up with different use cases, after all, we represent more than 50% of the potential end users.” On this front, at the upcoming MGA Annual Meeting in September 2025, there will be a Women in AM Summit, which will invite women from across the industry to network and share their knowledge and experiences. 

Ultimately, over the past decade Deutsche Bahn has proven to be a real innovator in the increasingly intersecting rail and additive sectors, not by taking a hard line on keeping its progress internal and protected, but by building a foundation for a collaborative industry.