Steam locomotive sheds used to exist at Howrah until the late 1970s. After Eastern Railway set a deadline to eliminate all steam locomotive operations by 1990, a push was given towards establishing electric locomotion as the primary motive power, and the steam locomotive sheds was decommissioned. To meet the needs of exponentially increasing rail traffic on the new continuous broad-gauge lines from Kolkata to rest of India with the completion of gauge conversion, the Howrah was selected by Indian Railways for a new electric locomotive shed. New electric locomotive shed was inaugurated in the late 2001s with
WAP-1 from Ghaziabad which stayed until late 2005, when they were transferred back to Ghaziabad again. It later got a large fleet of
WAP-4 locos, but later some of these were then moved to Asansol. All
WAP-6 locos from Asansol shed converted to WAP-4 units and transferred here. New
WAP-7 locos were acquired in 2011. In October 2019, Howrah ELS got its first WAP-5 locomotive from Vadodara. The shed also held a few WAM-4 units. All the WAM-4s of this shed have been retired/withdrawn from service. == Operations ==