Britain
The earliest railways employed horses to draw carts along rail tracks. In 1784, William Murdoch, a Scottish inventor, built a small-scale prototype of a steam road locomotive in See more

All locomotives are fitted with a variety of appliances. Some of these relate directly to the operation of the steam engine; others are for signalling, train control or other purposes. In the United States, the Federal Railroad Administration mandated the use of certain … See more

Steam locomotives are categorised by their wheel arrangement. The two dominant systems for this are the Whyte notation See more

Most manufactured classes
The most-manufactured single class of steam locomotive in the world is the 0-10-0 Russian locomotive class E See more

Boiler
The fire-tube boiler was standard practice for steam locomotive. Although other types of boiler were evaluated they were not widely used, except for some 1,000 locomotives in Hungary which used the water-tube See more

Numerous variations on the basic locomotive occurred as railways attempted to improve efficiency and performance.
Cylinders
Early steam … See more

Measurement
In the steam locomotive era, two measures of locomotive performance were generally applied. At first, locomotives were rated by tractive effort, defined as the average force developed during one revolution of the … See more