tank engine
tank engine noun: a steam locomotive that carries its fuel and water containers on the locomotive frames rather than in a separate tender.
Noun
tank engine (plural tank engines)
- A steam locomotive that carries its fuel and water containers on the locomotive frames rather than in a separate tender.
- Train journeys were not long in terms of distance, and having regard to these factors, the tank engine inevitably preponderated. [...] Among tank engines, the 0-6-2 wheel arrangement was by far the most numerous, there being nearly 450 of this arrangement, which offers the advantage of good power...1939 September, D. S. Barrie, “The Railways of South Wales”, in Railway Magazine, page 161
- The 2-4-2 tank engines of the Great Eastern and the London and North Western were simply adaptations of 2-4-0 main-line engines; the 0-4-4 tank engine owed its parentage to the archaic 0-4-2 mixed traffic.1952, Cuthbert Hamilton Ellis, The Beauty of Old Trains, page 117
- Synonyms:
- tank locomotive
Synonyms of tank engine
Forms of tank engine
| plural | tank engines |
|---|
Questions about tank engine
- What does tank engine mean?
- Tank engine means a steam locomotive that carries its fuel and water containers on the locomotive frames rather than in a separate tender.
- What part of speech is tank engine?
- Tank engine is a noun.
- What is the plural of tank engine?
- The plural of tank engine is tank engines.
Words near tank engine in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: tank engine (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
Last updated:
Cite this entry: “tank engine.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/tank_engine. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.