In the financial year ending March 2025, India produced 1,681 locomotives — more than the United States, all of Europe, South America, Africa, and Australia put together. A country that once imported every engine from Britain now leads the world in making them.
On April 16, 1853, India's first railway ran its inaugural journey — 34 kilometres from Bori Bunder in Bombay to Thane, hauled by three steam locomotives named Sahib, Sindh, and Sultan. All three engines had been built in Britain. For more than a century after that first journey, India imported the machines that moved its trains. It had the network, the track, the passengers — but not the factories.
That era is now decisively over. In the financial year ending March 31, 2025, India produced 1,681 locomotives across its state-owned manufacturing plants. The Ministry of Railways announced in April 2025, citing international industry data, that this output exceeded the combined locomotive production of the United States, all of Europe, South America, Africa, and Australia in the same period. India had become the world's largest manufacturer of locomotives outside China.
Chittaranjan breaks its own record
The headline figure from the year came out of Chittaranjan Locomotive Works (CLW), a factory in West Bengal's Asansol district that has been building engines since 1950. In FY 2024–25, CLW produced 700 electric locomotives — smashing its previous record of 581, set just the year before, by more than twenty percent.
CLW's achievement is part of a broader surge across the network of Indian locomotive factories. Banaras Locomotive Works in Varanasi contributed 477 units; Patiala Locomotive Works added 304; Madhepura Electric Locomotive Private Limited and Marhowra Diesel Locomotive Works supplied 100 each. The total of 1,681 represented a nineteen percent increase over the 1,472 units produced in FY 2023–24, which had itself been a record at the time.
The vast majority of the locomotives built are electric freight engines, part of Indian Railways' push to eliminate diesel traction on its network and run entirely on electricity — renewable where possible — by 2030. Heavier, more powerful electric locomotives also allow longer and heavier freight trains, which improves the efficiency of the network as a whole.
The scale of what India built
To put 1,681 locomotives in context: France's entire national rail fleet — the SNCF, one of Europe's largest — operates roughly 2,000 locomotives across passenger and freight services built over many decades. India produced more than eighty percent of that number in a single year.
The United States, which operates the world's most extensive freight rail network by distance, produced a small fraction of India's output in the same period. American locomotive manufacturing — dominated by Wabtec (formerly GE Transportation) and Progress Rail (Caterpillar subsidiary) — serves a large domestic market but at volumes that India's state-owned factories now surpass.
The reasons are structural. India's railways operate on a single integrated network with a common leadership, a shared procurement system, and factories that have steadily scaled up over decades of public investment. The US freight network is operated by seven major private railroads, each buying from different vendors on different cycles. India's centralised model, whatever its inefficiencies, enables the kind of concentrated production surge that produced 1,681 units in twelve months.
What this means for Indian manufacturing
The locomotive story is part of a pattern. In recent years, India has also become a significant producer of metro rail coaches — BEML in Bengaluru makes metro cars for Namma Metro and several other city systems. The Vande Bharat express trains, once prototypes, are now rolling out at dozens of units per year from ICF in Chennai and other factories. The BEML B28 high-speed prototype is targeting 280 km/h and is being assembled in Bengaluru.
The transformation from import dependence to world-leading production has taken about seventy years — roughly the span since Chittaranjan's first locomotive rolled off the line in 1950. It is not a story of sudden disruption but of patient industrial accumulation: building factories, training workers, localising components, and gradually raising output year after year until the numbers spoke for themselves.
In 1853, India imported three engines named Sahib, Sindh, and Sultan to haul its first train. In 2024–25, it built 1,681 — and outproduced everyone else.
Sources
- India produces record 1,681 locomotives in FY 2024-25, surpasses US and Europe — PIB, Ministry of Railways
- Chittaranjan Locomotive Works sets new record: 700 electric locomotives in FY 2024-25 — Rail Analysis India
- India surpasses Europe and US in locomotive production, manufactures 1681 locos in FY25 — India TV News