James Butler Hickok (May 27, 1837 – August 2, 1876), better known as "Wild Bill" Hickok, was a folk hero of the American Old West known for his life on the frontier as a soldier, scout, lawman, cattle rustler, gunslinger, gambler, showman, and actor, and for his involvement in many famous gunfights. He earned a great deal of notoriety in his own time, much of it bolstered by the many outlandish and often fabricated tales he told about himself. Some contemporaneous reports of his exploits are known to be fictitious, but they remain the basis of much of his fame and reputation.

Hickok was born and raised on a farm in northern Illinois at a time when lawlessness and vigilante activity were rampant because of the influence of the "Banditti of the Prairie". Drawn to this ruffian lifestyle, he headed west at age 18 as a fugitive from justice, working as a stagecoach driver and later as a lawman in the frontier territories of Kansas and Nebraska. He fought and spied for the Union Army during the American Civil War and gained publicity after the war as a scout, marksman, actor, and professional gambler. He was involved in several notable shootouts during the course of his life.

In 1876, Hickok was shot and killed while playing poker in a saloon in Deadwood, Dakota Territory (present-day South Dakota) by Jack McCall, an unsuccessful gambler. The hand of cards which he supposedly held at the time of his death has become known as the dead man's hand: two pairs; black aces and eights.

Hickok remains a popular figure of frontier history. Many historic sites and monuments commemorate his life, and he has been depicted numerous times in literature, film, and television. He is chiefly portrayed as a protagonist, although historical accounts of his actions are often controversial, and much of his career is known to have been exaggerated both by himself and by contemporary mythmakers. While Hickok claimed to have killed numerous named and unnamed gunmen in his lifetime, his career as a gunfighter only lasted from 1861 to 1871. According to Joseph G. Rosa, Hickok's biographer and the foremost authority on Wild Bill, Hickok killed only six or seven men in gunfights.

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A locomotive (from lat. loco motivus) is a railway vehicle that provides the motive power for a train, and has no payload capacity of its own; its sole purpose is to move the train along the tracks. In contrast, many trains feature self-propelled payload-carrying vehicles; these are not normally considered locomotives, and may be referred to as multiple units or railcars; the use of these self-propelled vehicles is increasingly common for passenger trains, but very rare for freight (see however CargoSprinter). Vehicles which provide the motive power to haul an unpowered train, but are not generally considered locomotives because they have payload space or are rarely detached from their trains, are known as power cars.

Traditionally, locomotives haul (pull) their trains. Increasingly common these days in local passenger service is push-pull operation, where a locomotive pulls the train in one direction and pushes it in the other, and is therefore optionally controlled from a control cab at the opposite end of the train. This is especially true of "High Speed Rail lines", such as the Japan’s Shinkansen and France’s TGV trains.

Origins: The first successful locomotives were built by Cornish inventor Richard Trevithick. In 1804 his unnamed locomotive hauled a train along the tramway of the Penydarren ironworks, near Merthyr Tydfil in Wales. Although the locomotive hauled a train of 10 tons of iron and 70 passengers in five wagons over nine miles it was too heavy for the cast iron rails used at the time. The locomotive only ran three journeys before it was abandoned.

In 1813, George Stephenson persuaded the manager of the Killingworth colliery where he worked to allow him to build a steam-powered machine. He built the Blucher, the first successful flanged-wheel adhesion locomotive. The flanges enabled the trains to run on top of the rails instead of in sunken tracks. This greatly simplified construction of switches (called "points" in UK) and rails, and opened the way to the modern railroad.