Since its foundation in 1930, SCHÖMA can look back on a success story of almost 90 years. The foundation stone for the company was laid by Christoph Schöttler, the grandfather of the current managing director. The first SCHÖMA locomotives, which were mainly used for peat extraction and in gravel pits, were equipped not only with their own transmissions, but also with self-constructed and self-assembled single-cylinder and two-cylinder diesel engines. Even today, SCHÖMA is still the only remaining manufacturer of locomotives suitable for peat operation.

The cardan drive developed at that time by SCHÖMA, which the company had protected by a patent, is still used in principle in all modern diesel locomotives.

At the end of the 1970s, SCHÖMA succeeded in entering tunnel construction. With the introduction of mechanized tunnel boring by means of appropriate milling cutters, it was suddenly possible to achieve performances that required larger transport capacities compared to conventional boring by means of earth-moving machines or explosives. Only a few years later SCHÖMA delivered more than 100 locomotives for the construction of the Eurotunnel.

The global infrastructural development, such as the expansion of metro networks in many large cities, the necessity of water and supply tunnels for the growing world population, the expansion of road and traffic networks and the large car tunnels required for this, has enabled SCHÖMA to expand our market beyond classic light rail locomotives.

In the mid-1990s, SCHÖMA developed a new concept to cope with the ever-increasing gradients in tunnel construction in order to meet the increasingly complex requirements this entailed: With 2 diesel engines and hydrostatic drive, 16 axles can be driven. At the end of the Nineties, SCHÖMA also developed its own microcontroller locomotive control system for all engine and transmission types. At the turn of the millennium, SCHÖMA launched its first battery-powered locomotives on the market.

In 2015, SCHÖMA began developing a hybrid locomotive, which has already been successfully tested as a prototype on a number of construction sites and will commence work as a small series for tunnel projects in New York and Great Britain in January 2019 and summer 2019 respectively. SCHÖMA is currently the world's only manufacturer of hybrid locomotives in the tunnel construction sector.

To date, SCHÖMA has delivered more than 7100 locomotives and rail vehicles to all continents of the world. The constantly changing world market requires constant improvements and continuous development - an exciting challenge that SCHÖMA gladly faces every day.