Chief Mechanical Engineer

Chief mechanical engineer and locomotive superintendent are titles applied by British, Australian, and New Zealand railway companies to the person ultimately responsible to the board of the company for the building and maintaining of the locomotives and . In Britain, the post of locomotive superintendent was introduced in the late 1830s, and chief mechanical engineer in 1886.

In the early Victorian era, projected canal or railway schemes were prepared by groups of promoters who hired specialists such as civil engineers, surveyors, architects or contractors to survey a route; and this resulted in the issue of a prospectus setting out their proposals. Provided that adequate capital could be raised from potential investors, agreements obtained from the landowners along the proposed route and, in Britain, an Act of Parliament obtained (different terminology is used in other countries), then construction might begin either by a new company specially formed to build and run it or by an existing company.

Design, construction and day-to-day operation of the canal or railway was managed by men who might otherwise work for the promoters. Some of the pioneer railway builders were self-taught, but others had gained their engineering experience constructing canals, or in military service. In Britain, the Institution of Civil Engineers had been founded in London in 1818, with Thomas Telford as its first president and its formation pre-dated many of the railway schemes. It obtained a Royal Charter in 1828. Later, the Institution of Mechanical Engineers was formed in 1847, with George Stephenson as its first president. The Corps of Royal Engineers, a British military organisation, was older than both of these civilian engineering institutions and it had extensive experience of (military) railway operations. For this reason, for almost 150 years from its foundation by the Board of Trade in 1840, Her Majesty's Railway Inspectorate recruited suitably qualified retired officers from the Corps into its "senior" arm, as railway inspecting officers. These officers retained their former military rank within the Inspectorate. It was to be 1985 before a railway inspecting officer without a previous military career was appointed: the officer transferred across from the "junior" arm: as a former railway employment inspector. Over the same period, of almost a century and a half, the Inspectorate was headed by a retired officer of the Corps of Royal Engineers as its chief inspecting officer. Other, former army officers, such as Charles Blacker Vignoles, were to gain new careers on the railways when they became under-employed after the Napoleonic War.

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