The United States trains have the highest energy demands in rail transport in the world. More than 90% of the trains are powered by diesel, which aggressively impacts climate change. Thus, railway system electrification is a trend to reduce the speed of global warming and realize carbon zero emissions. In addition, the current procedure of charging an electric locomotive is more complicated compared with charging an electric vehicle (EV). Thus, Inductive power transfer (IPT) technology has a huge potential for charging locomotives wirelessly. IPT technology has been extensively studied for EV application in the past decades. However, it has not drawn much attention to railway applications. Due to the unique requirements of the railway system, most of the EV coupler designs are not directly compatible with wireless charging applications for a train. To fill this technical gap, this dissertation discusses the design considerations for railway application and introduces a design of a modular 5-kW IPT system for rail locomotives. According to the design constraints, a novel W-I coupler is proposed for the 5-kW IPT system, and the system is optimized via ANSYS Maxwell, to achieve high power transfer capability and lower cost. The optimized LCL-S compensated IPT system is also proposed for the railway IPT system to improve the system efficiency. A prototype of the proposed IPT system is developed at an airgap of 5 inches and 85 kHz operating frequency. The prototype has been validated in full power of 5 kW with a DC to DC efficiency of 92.5%, which is the highest efficiency reported for the railway system. The experimental results validate the feasibility of the IPT system design for rail application. In addition, the factory manufacturing tolerance effect on the power transfer capability was also investigated. Most of the existing designs have not considered the system inductance variation caused by factory manufacturing tolerance and ambient environment change, which can weaken the power transfer capability of the IPT systems significantly. A 10% coil tolerance can lead to a power reduction of up to 61.3%. To fix this issue, this dissertation proposed a frequency modulated maximum power point tracking (MPPT) method to adjust the inverter frequency to achieve its maximum power point. The simulation results under different circumstances were analyzed. The experimental results show the feasibility of this method in improving the power transfer capability.