Dynamometer car

The work was undertaken to help support the position of the Great Western Railway in the controversy over standardizing the British track gauge.

[4] The first modern dynamometer car in the United States was built in 1874 by P. H. Dudley for the New York Central Railroad.

Modern dynamometer cars typically use electronic solid state measuring devices and instrumentation such as strain gauges.

A car built for the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Railroad is preserved at the Illinois Railway Museum.

[5] While the principal purpose of the dynamometer car was to measure the power output of locomotive, other data were typically collected, such as smoke box data, throttle settings and valve cut offs, fuel burn rates, and water usage to determine the overall performance and efficiency of the locomotive.

North Eastern Railway Dynamometer Car at the National Railway Museum in York
Victorian and South Australian Railways joint stock Dynamometer Car (coupled between the locomotive tender and the train) being used to record the performance of a VR X class locomotive running on pulverised brown coal .