Tender (rail)
vehicle for carrying a steam locomotive's supply of fuel and water
A tender is a special rail vehicle hauled by a steam locomotive containing its fuel (wood, coal, oil or torrefied biomass) and water. Steam locomotives consume large quantities of water compared to the quantity of fuel, so their tenders are necessary to keep them running over long distances. A locomotive that pulls a tender is called either a tender locomotive or a tender engine. Locomotives that do not have tenders and carry all their fuel and water on board are called tank locomotives.
A corridor tender is a locomotive tender with a passageway to one side, allowing crew changes on the fly.
A brake tender is a tender that is heavy and used (primarily) to provide greater braking efficiency.
General functions
The largest steam locomotives are semi-permanently coupled by a drawbar to a tender that carries the water and fuel. The fuel source used depends on what is economically available locally. In the UK and parts of Europe, a plentiful supply of coal made this the obvious choice from the earliest days of the steam engine. Until around 1850 in the United States, the vast majority of locomotives burned wood until most of the eastern forests were cleared.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Tender (rail)” is vehicle for carrying a steam locomotive's supply of fuel and water. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Tender, rail and vehicle, not as a finished interpretation.
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This entry incorporates text from “Tender (rail)” 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.