A top-and-tail

railway Rail transport (also known as train transport) is a means of transport that transfers passengers and goods on wheeled vehicles running on rails, which are incorporated in tracks. In contrast to road transport, where the vehicles run on a prep ...

train In rail transport, a train (from Old French , from Latin , "to pull, to draw") is a series of connected vehicles that run along a railway track and transport people or freight. Trains are typically pulled or pushed by locomotives (often kno ...

has

locomotive A locomotive or engine is a rail transport vehicle that provides the motive power for a train. If a locomotive is capable of carrying a payload, it is usually rather referred to as a multiple unit, motor coach, railcar or power car; t ...

s at both ends, for ease of changing direction, especially where the terminal station has no

run-round loop A headshunt (or escape track in the United States) is a short length of track provided to release locomotives at terminal platforms, or to allow shunting to take place clear of main lines. Terminal headshunt A 'terminal headshunt' is a short ...

. This is a British term. It is normal for only the leading locomotive to power the train when in top-and-tail mode. It is properly distinct from a push-pull train, which has a locomotive at one end and a control cab at the other end. Trains going up zig zags of the

Khyber Pass The Khyber Pass (خیبر درہ) is a mountain pass in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan, on the border with the Nangarhar Province of Afghanistan. It connects the town of Landi Kotal to the Valley of Peshawar at Jamrud by traversi ...

are top-and-tailed, although Pakistan Railways calls this by a different term. In

Japan Japan ( ja, 日本, or , and formally , ''Nihonkoku'') is an island country in East Asia. It is situated in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan, while extending from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north ...

, the term " push-pull" is confusingly used to describe trains top-and-tailed with a locomotive at either end. (True push-pull operation with a locomotive at one end is not seen on Japanese mainline railways.)

Australia

In New South Wales the XPT is a train with a light weight locomotive at either end. It is based on the British HST. The locomotive at the front operates at full traction power, while the locomotive at the rear operates at half power, the other half powering lighting and air conditioning, etc. This power arrangement is needed to cater with steep 1 in 40 (2,5%, or 25 ‰) and 1 in 33 (3%, or 30‰) gradients. Occasionally a short XPT train operates with only one engine and fewer carriages, in which case the whole train must be turned on a

triangle A triangle is a polygon with three edges and three vertices. It is one of the basic shapes in geometry. A triangle with vertices ''A'', ''B'', and ''C'' is denoted \triangle ABC. In Euclidean geometry, any three points, when non-colline ...

such as at

Dubbo Dubbo () is a city in the Orana Region of New South Wales, Australia. It is the largest population centre in the Orana region, with a population of 43,516 at June 2021. The city is located at the intersection of the Newell, Mitchell, and ...

. Top and tail operation is also used for ballast trains which have to move up and down a line undergoing track maintenance. It is safer to drive these trains from the front when operating in "reverse".

References

Rail transport operations {{Rail-transport-stub