Locomotives of India
Classes of locomotives used by Indian Railways
Indian Railways operates India's railway system and comes under the purview of the Ministry of Railways of Government of India. As of 2025, it maintains over 108,706 km (67,547 mi) of tracks and operates over 15,000 passenger and 10,000 freight trains daily with a fleet of more than 18,000 locomotives. The railways primarily operates a fleet of electric and diesel locomotives along with a few compressed natural gas (CNG) locomotives. Steam locomotives are operated on mountain railways and on heritage trains. As of February 2026, Indian Railways had 13,569 electric and 4,169 diesel locomotives.
History
The history of the Indian Railway began in 1832 with the proposal to construct the first railway line in India at Madras. In 1837, the first train ran on Red Hill railway line between Red Hills and Chintadripet in Madras and was hauled by a rotary steam engine imported from England. In 1852, a steam locomotive imported from England was tried at Byculla. In 1853, the first passenger train ran between Bombay and Thane. It had 14 carriages hauled by three steam locomotives: the Sahib, Sindh and Sultan.
The public source identifies “Locomotives of India” as classes of locomotives used by Indian Railways. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Locomotives, India and Classes.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q12061353. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2025, 2026, 1832 and 1837.
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This entry incorporates text from “Locomotives of India” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.