Since the invention of the very first railway steam locomotive in 1804, railway companies have applied names to their

locomotive A locomotive or engine is a rail transport vehicle that provides the Power (physics), motive power for a train. If a locomotive is capable of carrying a payload, it is usually rather referred to as a multiple unit, Motor coach (rail), motor ...

carriage A carriage is a private four-wheeled vehicle for people and is most commonly horse-drawn. Second-hand private carriages were common public transport, the equivalent of modern cars used as taxis. Carriage suspensions are by leather strapping an ...

s and

multiple unit A multiple-unit train or simply multiple unit (MU) is a self-propelled train composed of one or more carriages joined together, which when coupled to another multiple unit can be controlled by a single driver, with multiple-unit train contr ...

s. Numbers have usually been applied too, but not always; the

Great Western Railway The Great Western Railway (GWR) was a British railway company that linked London with the southwest, west and West Midlands of England and most of Wales. It was founded in 1833, received its enabling Act of Parliament on 31 August 1835 and ran ...

only applied names to its own

broad gauge A broad-gauge railway is a railway with a track gauge (the distance between the rails) broader than the used by standard-gauge railways. Broad gauge of , commonly known as Russian gauge, is the dominant track gauge in former Soviet Union (CIS ...

locomotives (though numbers were given to such locomotives that it inherited from elsewhere). Locomotive names have been inspired by a variety of topics over the two centuries of railway operation in the

United Kingdom The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and North ...

, and the principal themes are set out in the table below, together with some examples of locomotive classes where all or a large proportion carried such names. Two other types of thematic naming of locomotive classes have occurred: * Each name, though drawn from a variety of different people and things, was strongly connected to the locality through which the owning railway operated. For example the Metropolitan Railway's electric locomotives built in the 1920s carried the names of famous and fictional Londoners of varying types. * Each name commenced with the same word or letters. For example,

British Rail British Railways (BR), which from 1965 traded as British Rail, was a state-owned company that operated most of the overground rail transport in Great Britain from 1948 to 1997. It was formed from the nationalisation of the Big Four British rai ...

's Class 52 engines each carried a two-word name, the first of which was ''Western'',

Foster Yeoman Foster Yeoman Limited, based near Frome, Somerset, England, was one of Europe's largest independent quarrying and asphalt companies. It was sold to Aggregate Industries in 2006. History The company was founded by Foster Yeoman, from Hartlepool, ...

's Class 59 engines similarly had ''Yeoman'' as the first word, and the Class 47 engines operated by

Rail Express Systems Rail Express Systems (RES) was a sector of British Rail. This sector was responsible for transport of mail and parcels, including the travelling post office trains, as well as taking over charter operations from InterCity and haulage of the Roya ...

had names commencing with the letters ''Res''.

References

Notes

References

*{{cite book, last=Marsden & Ford, first=Colin J & Darren, year=1998, title=Encyclopedia of Modern Traction Names, publisher=Channel AV Publishing British Rail numbering and classification systems Rolling stock of Great Britain