📚 Locomotives

The engines that railed the world: the Rocket to the diesel, drawn up by the railways’ own drawing offices.

Below are the 30 works carrying the subject locomotives in the Open Library catalogue with the most editions in print. Author and first year are as the record states them; a missing year means the record does not carry one, not that the book is undated. Novels set in the subject are left out, because a list of historical fiction is not a list of history. Where one author dominates the reprint counts, no more than two of their titles appear.

Cover	Title	Author	First published	Editions
	A history of the growth of the steam-engine	Robert Henry Thurston	1878	33
	The history of the first locomotives in America	William H. Brown	1871	14
	The life of George Stephenson, railway engineer	Samuel Smiles	1857	13
	Differential diagnosis	Richard C. Cabot	1911	12
	British locomotives	C. J. Bowen Cooke	1893	10
	The locomotive up to date	Charles McShane	1899	9
	The British steam railway locomotive, 1825-1925	Ernest Leopold Ahrons	1927	9
	Early American steam locomotives	Reed Kinert	1962	8
	Trains	Franco Tanel	2007	8
	Illustrated catalogue of locomotives	Baldwin Locomotive Works	1871	7
	Locomotive engine running and management	Sinclair, Angus	1885	7
	Manual of model steam locomotive construction	Martin Evans	1960	6
	The last of steam	Joe G. Collias	1960	6
	The locomotives that Baldwin built	Fred Westing	1966	6
	Steam Trains	Colin Garratt	1984	6
	American locomotives	Edwin P. Alexander	1950	5
	Steam locomotive	O. S. Nock	1955	5
	A locomotive engineer's album	George B. Abdill	1965	5
	Flying Scotsman	Andrew Roden	2009	5
	Model Engine-Making	J. Pocock	2012	5
	Russian steam locomotives	H. M. Le Fleming	1960	4
	Iron Horses	E. P. Alexander	1970	4
	Model railway engines	J. E. Minns	1969	3
	The iron horse	Henry B. Comstock	1971	3
	The Gresley Pacifics	O. S. Nock	1973	3
	Steam locomotives	F. George Kay	1974	3
	The Encyclopedia of Trains and Locomotives	David Ross	2003	3
	The Baldwin Locomotive Works, 1831-1915	John K. Brown	1995	2
	De stoomtractie op Java en Sumatra	J. J. G. Oegema	1982	1
	Master railroad builder	Steve Booth	1992	1

List built from Open Library (CC0 metadata) · retrieved 05 Nov 2026 UTC · capped at 30 works per subject.

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