In the mid to late 1990s, a number of new locomotive leasing companies popped up to coincide with the privatization of rail traffic in Europe. The biggest of these companies were owned by the locomotive manufacturers or by the partners in the manufacturing of locomotives. These included ADTranz/Bombardier's Lokpool and Siemen's Dispolok.
Shortly thereafter a number of financial companies also entered the locomotive leasing business, like Mitsui Bank and others. These financial companies financed either the acquisition of new locomotives for railroads or purchased the locomotives themselves and then leased them out to private operators and to national railways.
Around 2002-2003, Bombardier sold it's Lokpool operation to Mitsui (MRCE). That company also acquired the Dispolok division from Siemens.
Since then, a number of other leasing companies have also got into the locomotive leasing business.

My question is this:

Let's say that a railways leased 20 locomotives of the then new Bombardier BR 185 class for 5 or 10 years in 2000.
That lease expired in either 2005 or 2010. In some cases, the locomotives were then purchased by the operator, in other cases, the locomotives were simply returned to the lease company, who then had to find new clients for those (used) locomotives while the original railway was free to go and lease brand new equipment, either from the same company or from a competing company.

What percentage of equipment returned to the leasing company is successfully leased to new operators? What happens to equipment that cannot find new operators?

This popped into my head as I was thinking about how many of the operators are now looking for locomotives that can operate on multiple systems and want to replace older models that were only good on one or two networks.

For example, BLS signed a deal to acquire some Siemens locomotives which can operate from Holland to Italy. The BLS currently subleases some locomotives from Railcare through Railpool in a swap deal for some of it's Re 425 and Re 465 which can only be used in Switzerland. I am guessing that the Siemens locomotives are due to enter into service at the end of the Railcare deal.

In North America, it is now normal to see older locomotives running for other shorelines or operators, often still in their original colours with just the numbers or some of the markings changed. Will we start seeing this in Europe too? I have already seen some former SBB/Lokoop-MThB Re 481 (now MRCE leased) where the blue, red and grey are still visible to some extent.

Regards

Mike C

Thanks Ray, very cool site.

Roger