Locomotive | Definition, History, Design, Types, & Facts (2024)

locomotive, any of various self-propelled vehicles used for hauling railroad cars on tracks.

Although motive power for a train-set can be incorporated into a car that also has passenger, baggage, or freight accommodations, it most often is provided by a separate unit, the locomotive, which includes the machinery to generate (or, in the case of an electric locomotive, to convert) power and transmit it to the driving wheels. Today there are two main sources of power for a locomotive: oil (in the form of diesel fuel) and electricity. Steam, the earliest form of propulsion, was in almost universal use until about the time of World War II; since then it has been superseded by the more efficient diesel and electric traction.

The steam locomotive was a self-sufficient unit, carrying its own water supply for generating the steam and coal, oil, or wood for heating the boiler. The diesel locomotive also carries its own fuel supply, but the diesel-engine output cannot be coupled directly to the wheels; instead, a mechanical, electric, or hydraulic transmission must be used. The electric locomotive is not self-sufficient; it picks up current from an overhead wire or a third rail beside the running rails. Third-rail supply is employed only by urban rapid-transit railroads operating on low-voltage direct current.

In the 1950s and ’60s the gas turbine was adopted by one American railroad and some European ones as an alternative to the diesel engine. Although its advantages have been nullified by advances in diesel traction technology and increases in oil price, it is still proposed as an alternative means for installing high-speed rail service for regions where no infrastructure for electric power is in place.

Steam locomotives

The basic features that made George and Robert Stephenson’s Rocket of 1829 successful—its multitube boiler and its system of exhausting the steam and creating a draft in its firebox—continued to be used in the steam locomotive to the end of its career. The number of coupled drive wheels soon increased. The Rocket had only a single pair of driving wheels, but four coupled wheels soon became common, and eventually some locomotives were built with as many as 14 coupled drivers.

Steam-locomotive driving wheels were of various sizes, usually larger for the faster passenger engines. The average was about a 1,829–2,032-mm (72–80-inch) diameter for passenger engines and 1,372–1,676 mm (54–66 inches) for freight or mixed-traffic types.

Supplies of fuel (usually coal but sometimes oil) and water could be carried on the locomotive frame itself (in which case it was called a tank engine) or in a separate vehicle, the tender, coupled to the locomotive. The tender of a typical European main-line locomotive had a capacity of 9,000 kg (10 tons) of coal and 30,000 litres (8,000 gallons) of water. In North America, higher capacities were common.

To meet the special needs of heavy freight traffic in some countries, notably the United States, greater tractive effort was obtained by using two separate engine units under a common boiler. The front engine was articulated, or hinge-connected to the frame of the rear engine, so that the very large locomotive could negotiate curves. The articulated locomotive was originally a Swiss invention, with the first built in 1888. The largest ever built was the Union Pacific’s Big Boy, used in mountain freight service in the western United States. Big Boy weighed more than 600 short tons, including the tender. It could exert 61,400 kg (135,400 pounds) of tractive force and developed more than 6,000 horsepower at 112 km (70 miles) per hour.

One of the best-known articulated designs was the Beyer-Garratt, which had two frames, each having its own driving wheels and cylinders, surmounted by water tanks. Separating the two chassis was another frame carrying the boiler, cab, and fuel supply. This type of locomotive was valuable on lightly laid track; it could also negotiate sharp curves. It was widely used in Africa.

Various refinements gradually improved the reciprocating steam locomotive. Some included higher boiler pressures (up to 2,000–2,060 kilopascals [290–300 pounds per square inch] for some of the last locomotives, compared with about 1,300 kilopascals [200 pounds per square inch] for earlier designs), superheating, feed-water preheating, roller bearings, and the use of poppet (perpendicular) valves rather than sliding piston valves.

Still, the thermal efficiency of even the ultimate steam locomotives seldom exceeded about 6 percent. Incomplete combustion and heat losses from the firebox, boiler, cylinders, and elsewhere dissipated most of the energy of the fuel burned. For this reason the steam locomotive became obsolete, but only slowly, because it had compensating advantages, notably its simplicity and ability to withstand abuse.

Electric traction

Efforts to propel railroad vehicles using batteries date from 1835, but the first successful application of electric traction was in 1879, when an electric locomotive ran at an exhibition in Berlin. The first commercial applications of electric traction were for suburban or metropolitan railroads. One of the earliest came in 1895, when the Baltimore and Ohio electrified a stretch of track in Baltimore to avoid smoke and noise problems in a tunnel. One of the first countries to use electric traction for main-line operations was Italy, where a system was inaugurated as early as 1902.

By World War I a number of electrified lines were operating both in Europe and in the United States. Major electrification programs were undertaken after that war in such countries as Sweden, Switzerland, Norway, Germany, and Austria. By the end of the 1920s nearly every European country had at least a small percentage of electrified track. Electric traction also was introduced in Australia (1919), New Zealand (1923), India (1925), Indonesia (1925), and South Africa (1926). A number of metropolitan terminals and suburban services were electrified between 1900 and 1938 in the United States, and there were a few main-line electrifications. The advent of the diesel locomotive inhibited further trunk route electrification in the United States after 1938, but following World War II such electrification was rapidly extended elsewhere. Today a significant percentage of the standard-gauge track in national railroads around the world is electrified—for example, in Japan (100 percent), Switzerland (92 percent), Belgium (91 percent), the Netherlands (76 percent), Spain (76 percent), Italy (68 percent), Sweden (65 percent), Austria (65 percent), Norway (62 percent), South Korea (55 percent), France (52 percent), Germany (48 percent), China (42 percent), and the United Kingdom (32 percent). By contrast, in the United States, which has some 225,000 km (140,000 miles) of standard-gauge track, electrified routes hardly exist outside the Northeast Corridor, where Amtrak runs the 720-km (450-mile) Acela Express between Boston and Washington, D.C.

The century’s second half also was marked by the creation in cities worldwide of many new electrified urban rapid-transit rail systems, as well as extension of existing systems.