Can railroad locomotives run strictly on battery power?

Yes, they can but never in the yard. There is a "creep"mode where battery voltage can be shunted to the number 1ctraction motor, srictly for moving short distances in the mechanical department limits. There is no compressor running to operate the air brakes.

Certainly not ordinary locomotives, as the only battery power they have installed is for low-voltage control purposes, and engine starting on smaller locomotives and multiple units. Large road locomotives are often started with compressed air.

However, battery-powered locomotives do exist: the London Underground system in the UK has a number of versatile battery locos for hauling night-time engineering trains, where the electric power is shut off. They are essentially electric locomotives, and when standing idle or working under electric power, the electricity also charges a large bank of batteries. When the loco reaches the section of track where the power is turned off, it operates on the batteries. These locomotives are built to 'tube' dimensions (i.e. they fit within a circular tunnel a shade over eleven and a half feet in diameter), weigh 67 tons, have traction motors giving over 800hp, and can haul 200-ton trains at 15mph on battery power (30mph on straight electric). The batteries consist of 256 cells giving a capacity of 900 amp-hours at a five-hour rate. You can appreciate from this that a battery locomotive of normal power output would be totally impractical, due to the weight of the batteries that it would have to carry around, and that these LT machines are probably at the limit of the design.

Yes, they can, though a normal locomotive can only move very slowly on the batteries, it is done in the shop for short moves.

There also are newer models with huge banks of batteries that the locomotive can run on, but there are also small diesel engines to recharge them, and they can come on line automatically as needed.

I suppose there could be some little bitty switch engines that can run for a short time on battery power, but it takes a heck of a lot of power to move a train and I don't know of any "locomotives" that use battery power at all.

Modern diesel locomotives use the diesel engine to turn a HUGE generator that makes the electrical power that drives the train.

....No...........they require too much ..not only High Voltage..but also High Current to run the drive motors at the wheels.....