BFor Sigrid Nikutta, pretty much everything is different from what you are used to from board members of large corporations. When she is in Berlin, she also works high up in the Bahntower with a view over the capital. But her office is rather unusual. As a desk, she uses a narrow standing desk that doesn’t have much room for more than a notebook. Behind it is a high, orthopedic swivel stool on which she could sit down. But it can hardly be assumed that she will do this for a longer period of time. There is a group of chairs in front of the pointed window front. And of course there is a conference table. Her black backpack is lying on the floor, into which she will later quickly slide her notebook before she moves on.
But now she has time. And she is there to talk about tasks that her predecessors have all bitten their teeth on. Nikutta heads the freight transport division of Deutsche Bahn, the problem child of the group, constant loss-maker, a nuisance above all for drivers who get upset when there are queues of trucks that there is always talk of more freight transport on the rails, but nothing ever happens. Since 2020, Nikutta has been responsible for this on the Deutsche Bahn Group Board of Management. She is also CEO of the freight transport subsidiary DB Cargo. With an office in Mainz. Her advantages: She knows rail, as she proved at the head of the Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe (BVG), and she knows freight transport well because she worked in management positions at DB Cargo before her time at the BVG. Someone had even brought her into play as a potential successor to CEO Lutz when he was being criticized again, which is not unusual for a Bahn boss.
