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Click or hover over numbers to see names. The diagram, which is not to scale, is a composite of various designs in the late steam era. Some components shown are not the same as, or are not present, on some locomotives – for example, on smaller or articulated types. Conversely, some locomotives have components not listed here.
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Components of a locomotive, e.g. 'cylinder' or 'piston rod', use 'Locomotive parts' Individual locomotive classes use the relevant country, railway company or wheel arrangement category. Generic types of steam locomotive e.g. 'Mallet' or 'Crampton', use 'Steam locomotive types' Locomotive systems or technologies e.g. 'Boiler feedwater' or ...
A steam locomotive is a locomotive that provides the force to move itself and other vehicles by means of the expansion of steam. [1]: 80 It is fuelled by burning combustible material (usually coal, oil or, rarely, wood) to heat water in the locomotive's boiler to the point where it becomes gaseous and its volume increases 1,700 times.
A locomotive's direction of travel and cut-off are set from the cab by using a reversing lever or screw reverser actuating a rod reaching to the valve gear proper. Some larger steam engines employ a power reverse, which is a servo mechanism, usually powered by steam.
Especially in steam days, wheel arrangement was an important attribute of a locomotive because there were many different types of layout adopted, each wheel being optimised for a different use (often with only some being actually "driven"). Modern diesel and electric locomotives are much more uniform, usually with all axles driven.
The Walschaerts valve gear is a type of valve gear used to regulate the flow of steam to the pistons in steam locomotives, invented by Belgian railway engineer Egide Walschaerts in 1844. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] The gear is sometimes named without the final "s", [ a ] since it was incorrectly patented under that name.
The way the valve controlled the steam entering and leaving the cylinder was known as steam distribution and shown by the shape of the indicator diagram. What happened to the steam inside the cylinder was assessed separately from what happened in the boiler and how much friction the moving machinery had to cope with.