Portal:Trains/Selected article/Week 42, 2006

A locomotive (from Latin: loco motivus) is a railway vehicle that provides the motive power for a train, and has no payload capacity of its own; its sole purpose is to move the train along the tracks. The first successful locomotives were built by Cornish inventor Richard Trevithick. In 1804 his unnamed locomotive hauled a train along the tramway of the Penydarren ironworks, near Merthyr Tydfil in Wales. In 1813, George Stephenson built Blücher, the first successful flanged-wheel adhesion locomotive. Before the middle of the 20th century, electric and diesel-electric locomotives began replacing steam locomotives. Traditionally, locomotives pull their trains. Increasingly common in passenger service is push-pull operation, where a locomotive pulls the train in one direction and pushes it in the other, and is therefore optionally controlled from a control car at the opposite end of the train.

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